Inspecting Your AbleBean

You can add your own custom inspector to the text and graphic inspectors that Able provides. In the beaninfo file, the inspector name is used both as the key in a hashtable, and the text to appear on the cascading menu. The inspector class name is the hashtable object and is called when your inspector is selected from the context menu to format and display the desired values of object.

Custom inspectors are added to the Bean Descriptor by adding their name and class to a hashtable with a bean property name of "able-custom-inspectors". Custom inspector views will appear in the View pull-down menu on the inspector frame. Here is an example:

Hashtable lclCustomInspectors = new Hashtable();
lclCustomInspectors.put("Network graphic", "com.ibm.able.beans.AbleNetworkGraphicView");
lclBeanDescriptor.setValue("able-custom-inspectors", lclCustomInspectors);

Using the same technique, you can customize the property panel to appear when Options->Properties menu is selected:

// add optional customizer panel for the associated custom view
Hashtable lclCustomInspectorPanels = new Hashtable();
lclCustomInspectorPanels.put("Network graphic", "com.ibm.able.editor.AbleNetworkGraphicPanel");

The object inspected will be passed in as the sole parameter of the class constructor. The class must implement the PropertyChangeListener interface.

Property change events will be issued when values change, and the inspector needs to refresh its panel as appropriate using data from the reference to the object passed on the constructor.

You may surface data members from your bean by providing the displayable name and gettor method in the BeanInfo file's getPropertyDescriptors() method. Any values you list will be selectable from the inspector's parameters dialog.