Persistence with custom properties

[tlf30]

Hello,
With the old persistence system, I was saving custom properties that were not directly tied to fields in the code.
Is there a way to accomplish this with the new system without creating a field for each property?

Also, I am running into an unsupported property type exception, I think it is on a boolean type. Could you please add booleans and make the exception more descriptive? Currently the exception does not have any information to identify what property is the issue.

Thanks,
Trevor

[andrewauclair]

Maybe I could add support for Map<String, String> somehow to the new system. Best of both worlds.

I did all the basic types and somehow forgot boolean? That's a pain. I'll get that added.

[tlf30]

Thanks,
I am thinking about the Map<String, String>. The old setup was a little clunky. Do you think you could provide some type of static access to the persistence that gets the same properties as the annotations and allows accessing existing annotated properties, and adding new ones? Perhaps it does not need to be static to implement it, but I have not done a deep dive to see how the new system works.

[andrewauclair]

Let me see if I understand what you're asking. Some way to basically write your own read/write handling for property annotations?

Should be doable. Maybe using reflection to find static functions with certain signatures that read and write in the type? This would have to be for custom user defined types only. But that should still make it possible to implement primitives I may have missed by just wrapping them in a class and writing the read/write.

[tlf30]

I was thinking something like AppState.put(dockable, "property name", value)

And an associated getter. This would allow for properties to be stored that do not have an associated annotated field. Putting a property does not necessarily need to write to an annotated field if one exists for the property, but that would be a cool feature.

[andrewauclair]

I like that.

How about:

public static String getProperty(Dockable dockable, String propertyName);
public static void setProperty(Dockable dockable, String propertyName, String value);

These properties would get saved together with the rest of the properties through DockableProperties. They will also be loaded together, any property that is not associated with a field in the Dockable will be set in AppState before updateProperties is called.

Maybe there's a way to keep the type for these ones as well. I just can't think of it right now.

[tlf30]

That would work great. Preserving the type would be very nice, but for now strings would be fine.

[i-make-robots]

https://github.com/andrewauclair/ModernDocking/wiki/Persistence

Please, how do i use persistence? I don't see it in the wiki, the documentation, or the single-app examples.

[andrewauclair]

I have this planned for the new documentation. But the essentials can be found in the basic example. Snippet below:

SwingUtilities.invokeLater(() -> {

    setVisible(true);

    // now that the main frame is set up with the defaults, we can restore the layout
    AppState.setPersistFile(layoutFile);

    try {
        AppState.restore();
    } catch (DockingLayoutException e) {
        // something happened trying to load the layout file, record it here
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    AppState.setAutoPersist(true);
});

Auto persistence defaults to off and has to be turned on by the application. Persistence works off of a 500ms timer which is fired any time AppState.persist is called. Either manually by the application or automatically by the docking framework when dockables are moved, windows resized, splits resized, etc.

Layouts can also be saved and loaded from your own files with a combination of DockingState.getApplicationLayout() and LayoutPersistence.saveLayoutToFile for saving and LayoutPersistence.loadApplicationLayoutFromFile and DockingState.restoreApplicationLayout for loading.

I will link the new documentation here when it is ready.

[i-make-robots]

should I be concerned about the very angry looking messages in my log file? 

[andrewauclair]

No, it's just an info. Not sure why an info gets colored red. That's a little weird.

I probably should set that to debug instead of info. Mostly a sanity check to myself that the persist is always working.