Open Toolkit for Making Java Swing Database-Aware

New Roads, LA — September 26, 2003 — SwingSet is an open source Java toolkit that allows the standard Java Swing components to be made database-aware. While there are several commercially available solutions that perform similar tasks, SwingSet is the first known open source solution.

SwingSet utilizes SSTextDocument, an extension of the standard PlainDocument class to link the JTextField or JTextArea to a database column within a RowSet. In addition, custom classes are provided to replace the standard JComboBox and JCheckBox. The SSComboBox provides an Access-like combobox that can be used to display user-specified text choices based on an underlying numeric column (e.g. allows my_table!choice_code, an integer column with valid values of 0, 1, & 2, to be displayed as “yes,” “no,” & “maybe”). The SSDBComboBox operates in a similar fashion, but is used where both values and their corresponding text choices are stored in a table (e.g. my_table!part_id is stored as a foreign key, but my_table!part_name is diplayed). By writing a custom event listener, SSDBComboBox may also be used to navigate a RowSet based on a combobox selection. The SSCheckBox allows a checkbox to be linked to an underlying numeric database column. Finally, a SSDataNavigator class is provided to allow traversal, insertion, deletion, commit, and rollback of a RowSet. Changes to the current record are auto-committed when a navigation takes place (also similar to Access).

More information on SwingSet is available from the SourceForge project page.