Context View and Filtering for Beans

Classic Servoy
1

Hello all…

I love Servoy, and now that I’m starting to get my hands dirty with it I’m running into some difficulties that seem design-related. So, this seems like the forum to post to. If these issues have been dealt with elsewhere, please forgive me. (And please point me towards any documentation I may have missed.)

I’ve recently been working with a drag-and-drop bean developed internally. Although the bean itself works fine in Servoy, there are a couple of issues that make things more difficult than it would seem they need to be.

  1. Every single method of every single inherited class shows up in in the Method Editor, even though there are only four methods at the highest level. That is, although there are only four actual methods I’ll ever call from Servoy in this bean, there are 229 methods (and 33 properties!) exposed in the Method Editor. Could there be (or is there already) some way to either a) filter out the lower-level methods, or b) institute some kind of context subhierarchies, perhaps with filesystem-like clickable headings? Of course, b) seems like it would be more flexible in the long run, while a) seems easier to implement.

  2. The tooltips for each method exposed by the bean show only the basic template for the method (i.e., parameters and return type), but doesn’t show what context the method is part of. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if all the methods didn’t show up as noted above. It would be extremely helpful to see context for these methods. (Or is this something that can be dealt with in the Java source? If so, a pointer to API documentation would be helpful.)

Thanks for considering this.

Regards,

Bill

2
  1. Java Beans spec. states that when BeanInfo is used by bean developer you can hide methods, so the bean developer should do this
  2. You have to lookup the documentation for each bean method, Java does not provide another way to show/retrieve this.