Informagen Cooee Text Components
Version 1.0.3

Will Gilbert (gilbert@informagen.com)

The Components

• HorizontalRule - based on the "Writing Your Own Component Peers, Part 1" tutorial by Brad Baker. Many thanks to Brad for writing this series of "How to" tutorials.
  
• RegExTextField - Uses two regular expressions to validate input. One expression filters the input, while the second expression validates the field.
  
• IntegerTextField - Accepts integer input, can validate against a range.
  
• NumericTextField - Accepts floating point input, can validate against a range.
  
• ActiveTextArea - displays a character counter. If a maximum number of characters has been set, displays the remaining character count, foreground and background change if the maximum is exceeded. Let the business logic decide if the input is to be accepted, rejected or truncated.
  

What's New

• setRegExFilter(String) Now does input character filtering only!
• boolean isValid();
• setRequired(boolean);
• setRequiredMessage(String);
• Fixed RegExTextFilter to filter the entire string not just the right most character (v1.0.2)
• Fixed error in filter regular expression in NumericTextField (decimal point "." s/b "\\.") (v1.0.2)
• Fixed error with integer parsing in IntegerTextField by specifying radix 10 (parseInt(newval,10)) (v1.0.3)

The last three methods were done in the abstract class 'ActiveTextField' and get inherited into the three subclass TextFields.

When "Required" is true, a warning triangle and the warning message are displayed regardless of the other 'visibility' properties for icons or message. I believe this captures the intention of a required field. One might want a required warning but none of the other stuff.

What's To Do

• JavaDoc
• Examples of RegExTextField usage

Download

Installation

Uncompress the ZIP or TAR file into the directory "TextComponents".

Rebuilding from source with Maven2

You can download and install Maven2 from its download site.

Build and install the Component Library

From a terminal window, go to the Components/Libary directory.

% mvn install

This will compile the source, merge in the resources, and move the resulting JAR file into your local Maven2 repository. If this is your first time using Maven, it will also download several plug-ins which it needs. Be patient, these will only be downloaded once. Refer to the Maven documentation for the location of the local Maven repository. On UNIX based systems (Linux and MacOS X), it is located at ~/.m2, and there settings to reconfigure this location. For Windows the repository is locatd at C:\Documents and Settings\USER\.m2

Build and Run the Test Harness

Change to the Testing directory and run jetty.

% cd ../Testing/
% mvn jetty:run

This builds the Testing application WAR file, loads the Cooee and Informagen Cooee Components libraries and runs Jetty, a very nice servlet container. Log messages are sent to the terminal window which started Jetty. Maven will download more plugins in order to to run Jetty. As with the plugins above these will only be downloaded once.

Viewing the Testing Harness

From any browser enter the following URL. Press the "Start" button from the initial HTML page.

http://localhost:9090/Cooee-Test-Harness/

Deploying to Different Targets

Maven has the notion of "Filters & Profiles". These can be used create WAR files for specific targets using a properties file to filter the source and resource files, looking for substition tags of the form ${subsitution.tag.string}

Using the provided POM file one can target the localhost Tomcat server, using the localhost profile and the localhost filter file. This is great for version numbers, log level and log filename, and a myriad of other uses.

% mvn clean package -P localhost

It's always a good idea to clean often, especially when changing profiles.

Conclusion

Enjoy these new Cooee components as much I as I enjoyed writing them.

Do give Maven a try! Using two terminal windows, you create a new package in one and run jetty in the other as a great way to develop WAR based application. Jetty can be stopped and started very quickly. Be warned, even though Jetty monitors your source files and can automatically reload the web application on its own, this tends to work with diminishing returns, eventually your WAR application will become unresponsive and you have to kill -9 Jetty from another terminal window.

Oh yes, one more thing....

Based on Brad Baker's "Writing Your Own Component Peers, Part 3" tutorial I have included the HTML prototype files used to develop the HTML and CSS for these components. These files can be found in Components/Library/src/prototype

This is your first stop in developing your own Cooee components.