The IconView is probably the easier of NetBeans views. This view has been recently (as 2011) updated in the NetBeans sources.

Using this view is very simple: just create a new one ("new IconView()") and add it to your user interface. You're done.

The view will automatically seek for an appropriate ExplorerManager in the component hierarchy, and will show the nodes in the ExplorerManager as a set of visual icons.

One of the more important views in the NetBeans UI Component library is the BeanTreeView. This works like a JTree in Swing.

To use one of these in your application you just have to add it to your user interface, and you're all set:

    // Add a BeanTreeView
    beanTreeView = new BeanTreeView();
    beanTreeView.setSelectionMode( ListSelectionModel.SINGLE_SELECTION );
    pnlBeanTreeViewContainer.add(beanTreeView, BorderLayout.CENTER);
    

The BeanTreeView will pair itself with the first ExplorerManager.Provider that exists in the component hierarchy, and will render its contents as a tree. You can expand the nodes (the QueryNode, for instance) and you will then see the way the children are populated lazily (using the ChildFactory we implemented in previous sections). It's simple, isn't it?

If you right-click on the "QueryNode" node you'll see a popup menu with a Reload menu item. We'll get to that in later sections of the tutorial.

ListViews are used to render Nodes like lists, and are thus similar to the Swing JList component. To use a ListView just add it to your component hierarchy and again it will pair itself with the first ExplorerManager.Provider in the component hierarchy. You're done.

If you launch the sample application using Java Web Start (use "javaws http://swingnbrcp.kenai.com/launch.jnlp" as Kenai may not properly set the JNLP mime type) you can see the ListView in action. Note that there's a weird behaviour if you double click on some nodes. We'll get to that in later sections (when we learn about actions).

There are more views you can use, such as the ContextTreeView or the ChoiceView or the MenuView that we won't be reviewing in these notes. You're welcome to experiment with those in the sample application, though!.

In the next section we'll review one of the more powerful and advanced NetBeans components: the OutlineView that works much like a "TreeTable", this is, a combination of a tree and a table. It's so important that it deserves a whole section.

In this section we've quickly seen different NetBeans UI components, how easy it is to use them and how they attach to the appropriate ExplorerManager.Provider in the component hierarchy.

In the next section we'll see another very important NetBeans component: the OutlineView.