Learning Java, 4th Edition

Customizing with BeanInfo

So far, everything NetBeans has known about our beans has been determined by low-level reflection—that is, by looking at the methods of our classes. The java.Beans.Introspector class gathers information on a bean using reflection, then analyzes and describes a bean to any tool that wants to know about it. The introspection process works only if the class follows the JavaBeans naming conventions for its methods; furthermore, it gives us little control over exactly what properties and events appear in NetBeans menus. For example, we’ve seen that NetBeans by default shows all the stuff we inherit from the base Swing component. We can change that by creating BeanInfo classes for our beans. A BeanInfo class provides the JavaBeans introspector with explicit information about the properties, methods, and events of a bean; we can even use it to customize the text that appears in menus in NetBeans (and in other IDEs).

A BeanInfo class implements the BeanInfo interface. That’s a complicated proposition; in most situations, the introspector’s default behavior is reasonable. Instead of implementing the BeanInfo interface, we extend the SimpleBeanInfo class, which implements all of BeanInfo’s methods. We can override specific methods to provide the information we want; when we don’t override a method, we’ll get the introspector’s default behavior.

In the next few sections, we’ll develop the DialBeanInfo class that provides explicit information about our Dial bean.

Getting ...