ObservableList vs Models (original) (raw)

Mark Claassen markclaassenx at gmail.com
Wed Oct 17 13:01:51 PDT 2012


I really like the promise of the ObservableList, but am a bit wary of the current implementation.

We have several instances in our code where we rely on unique models wrapping the same data. We can have a large list of items, and show them in a combo box, and list, and a table. Generally, only one of these is visible at a given time, but having a single backing list is very handy.

Further, each list can be independently sorted and filtered via a decorator construct in the model.

By tweaking the underlying list object (so it fires events) and model (so that it listens to events), we accomplished something similar to an ObservableList:

However, different from ObservableList, we can manage the side-effects...not sorting and filtering all models in an identical fashion.

Is there a mechanism to do this in JavaFX? The Swing methodology seemed a nice way to do it. With ObservableLists, it seems that in the end, I don't get much. The more common / trivial case is handled. However, in the case of a our application, I will need to

Am I missing something? Is there a way to have an ObservableList listening to another ObservableList, so that list #2 can notice the updates without forcing the sort order and filtering on list #1? Or am I just going to end up having to cut through extra/different layers of abstraction to re-implement what I had in Swing.

Mark



More information about the openjfx-dev mailing list