Java Swing, 2nd Edition

The UndoManager Class

UndoManager is an extension of CompoundEdit that can track a history of edits, allowing them to be undone or redone one at time. Additionally, it implements UndoableEditListener by calling addEdit( ) each time an UndoableEditEvent is fired. This allows a single UndoManager to be added as a listener to many components that support undo, providing a single place to track all edits and populate an undo menu for the entire application.

It may seem a bit strange that UndoManager extends CompoundEdit. We’ll explain why shortly, but first it’s important to understand the primary ways in which UndoManager acts differently than CompoundEdit. For starters, when you add an edit to an UndoManager, it is placed in a list of edits available for undo. When you call undo( ), only the first (significant) edit is undone. This is different from the behavior of CompoundEdit, in which a call to undo( ) results in a call to undo( ) on all of the added edits.

Another major difference between UndoManager and its superclass is the semantics of the inProgress property. In CompoundEdit, we could add new edits only when we were inProgress, and only after calling end( ) could undo( ) or redo( ) be called. In contrast, UndoManager allows undo( ) and redo( ) to be called while it is inProgress. Furthermore, when end( ) is called, it stops supporting sequential undo/redo behavior and starts acting like CompoundEdit (undo( ) and redo( ) call their superclass implementations when the UndoManager ...