Java Swing

The View Classes

Now that we have an overview of what views are and how they fit together, we’ll take a closer look at each of the public view classes, starting with the abstract base class, View.

The View Class

This abstract class represents how a single Element is displayed within a document. It defines properties and behavior common to different types of views. As we showed in Figure 23.2, all other view classes extend from View.

Properties

The View class defines the properties shown in Table 23.2. The attributes property defines the AttributeSet used by the view to render an Element. By default, the Element’s attributes are used. However, view objects should access the attributes through the getAttributes() accessor, to allow view-specific attributes to be added to the Element’s attributes or to allow the attributes to be converted in some way by the view subclasses.

Table 23-2. View Properties

Property	Data Type	get	is	set	bound	Default Value
alignment (indexed)	float	•				0.5
attributes	AttributeSet	•				from the Element
container	Container	•				from parent
document	Document	•				from the Element
element	Element	•				from constructor
endOffset	int	•				from the Element
maximumSpan (indexed)	float	•				if resizeWeight==0, preferredSpan, else Integer.MAX_VALUE
minimumSpan (indexed)	float	•				if resizeWeight==0, preferredSpan, else 0
parent	View	• ...