An excellent thing I learned today is that you, as a developer of a NetBeans module or NetBeans Platform application, can control
the pin button. Up until today, whenever I had a TopComponent defined to appear in "rightSlidingSide" mode and then I clicked
the "pin" button, as shown here...
...
the TopComponent would then find itself pinned in
the "explorer" mode. Would make more sense if it would be pinned in
the "properties" mode, which is
the docked mode closest to
the "rightSlidingSide" mode. Not being able to control
the "pin" button has been a recurring question (including in my own head) over several years.
But
the NetBeans Team's window system guru Stan Aubrecht informed me today that a "previousMode" attribute exists in
the "tc-ref" file of
the TopComponent. Since a few releases, that file is generated via
the annotations in
the TopComponent. However, "previousMode" is currently not one of
the attributes exposed by
the @TopComponent.Registration annotation.
Therefore, what I did was this:
Set "rightSlidingSide" in
the "mode" attribute of
the @TopComponent.Registration.
Build
the module.
Find
the "generated-layer.xml" (in
the Files window) and move
the layer registration of
the TopComponent, including its action and menu item for opening
the TopComponent, into my own manual layer
within the module. Then remove all
the TopComponent annotations from
the TopComponent, though you can keep @ConvertAsProperties and @Messages.
Then add
the "previousMode" attribute, as highlighted below, into my own layer file, i.e.,
within the tags copied from
the "generated-layer.xml":
<folder name="Modes">
<folder name="rightSlidingSide">
<file name="ComparatorTopComponent.wstcref">
<![CDATA[<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE tc-ref PUBLIC "-//NetBeans//DTD Top Component in Mode Properties 2.0//EN"
"http://www.netbeans.org/dtds/tc-ref2_0.dtd">
<tc-ref version="2.0">
<tc-id id="ComparatorTopComponent"/>
<state opened="false"/>
<previousMode name="properties" index="0" />
</tc-ref>
]]>
</file>
</folder>
</folder>
Now when you run
the application and pin
the specific TopComponent defined above, i.e., in
the above case, named "ComparatorTopComponent", you will find it is pinned into
the "properties" mode! That's pretty cool and if you agree, then you're a pretty cool NetBeans Platform developer, and I'd love to find out more about
the application/s you're creating on
the NetBeans Platform!
Meanwhile, I'm going to create an issue for exposing
the "previousMode" attribute in
the @TopComponent.Registration annotation.
