Property Sheet Reference

This document details a few ways in which the Property Sheet can be customized or affected by system properties, UI manager keys, non-normative hints from Nodes and such.

System properties that affect the behavior of the Property Sheet

Note that generally these flags may or may not be supported in future versions. The following flags may be passed to the JVM in the form runide -J-Dsome.property=true which affect the user interface of the Property Sheet. Generally they represent either cases where different applications have different requirements, or where there is some contention about which style is the most effective.

UIManager settings that affect Property Sheet display characteristics

The Property Sheet will look for a number of custom values in UIManager, which may be supplied to affect its appearance, either by a themes.xml file in the user directory, or by a custom look and feel. It is not required that UIManager return non-null for any of these values - they are optional for enhancing the presentation of the Property Sheet:

Customization of PropertyPanel

The PropertyPanel component is a generic component which will display a property editor for a single property - rather like a single cell of the Property Sheet. There are a few non-normative client properties which may be set on it to change its behavior, via putClientProperty().

Using Tabs in a Property Sheet in a stand-alone application

The Property Sheet can display different property sets in different tabs - all sets that return the same value from PropertySet.getValue("tabName") will be aggregated together on the same tab.

To use this functionality in a standalone application, an implementation of org.netbeans.modules.openide.explorer.TabbedContainerBridge must be available via Lookup.getDefault(). For an example, see org.netbeans.core.windows.view.ui.tabcontrol.TabbedContainerBridgeImpl. A non-functional implementation is provided if none is present via lookup, to enable unit testing.