Eclipse SWT Designer

Department of Computer Science 12 - An Eclipse GUI Builder

University of Manitoba

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www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~eclipse

12 - An Eclipse GUI Builder

Overview: .................................................................................................................... 1

A GUI Builder:............................................................................................................ 1

Acquiring the Designer Plug-in:.................................................................................. 2

Installation:.................................................................................................................. 2

Activating the Designer:.............................................................................................. 3

NullLayout: ............................................................................................................... 15

FillLayout: ................................................................................................................. 18

RowLayout: ............................................................................................................... 19

GridLayout: ............................................................................................................... 20

StackLayout (Professional Version Only):................................................................ 30

BorderLayout (Professional Version Only): ............................................................. 31

Custom JFace Dialog Creation:................................................................................. 42

JFace Application Creation (Professional Version Only): ........................................ 46

Code Generation Options: ......................................................................................... 50

Additional Features of the Designer:......................................................................... 53

Creating a UI: Two Examples ................................................................................... 55

Creating a GUI for an Address Book Application: ................................................... 55

Creating a new Project: ............................................................................................. 55

Creating a new SWT Application: ............................................................................ 55

Department of Computer Science 12 - An Eclipse GUI Builder

University of Manitoba

Creating a Tabbed Folder:......................................................................................... 69

The Transactions Tab: ............................................................................................... 71

Running the Application: .......................................................................................... 73

Department of Computer Science 12 - An Eclipse GUI Builder

1, 2

at its features. The GUI Builder that we will look at in this tutorial is the Designer

created by Instantiations, Inc., and is available at http://www.swt-designer.com. We will

A GUI Builder:

In the previous tutorials, we have seen that SWT and Eclipse are fairly simple and

The Designer is a plug-in that allows you design SWT and Swing GUIs in Eclipse. The

Designer. The Swing part is called the Swing Designer and is similar to the SWT

the SWT Designer and the Swing Designer.

Swing Designer, this tutorial will mainly look at features of the SWT Designer. To

demonstrate the similarities and the differences between the SWT Designer and the

Department of Computer Science 12 - An Eclipse GUI Builder

You can get a username and password by registering at the Designer’s website.

will add three folders to your plugin directory that start with com.swtdesigner.

Department of Computer Science 12 - An Eclipse GUI Builder

on the left side of the Preferences window, click on License, and then click on the button

that says “Registration and Activation”.

Both SWT and Swing support comes with the Designer product, but depending on your