Hello SWinxy,
Thank you for the feedback. We will consider your feedback
suggestions and these are really helpful in this proposal.
Regards,
Tejesh R
From: SWinxy <[email protected]>
Sent: 22 August 2024 23:37
To: Tejesh R <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: [External] : Re: Seeking feedback on a possible JDatePicker Swing
component
Tejesh, I think it would be a nice feature, and I would be happy to help with
it. There are a lot of considerations for displaying calendars. I don't think
we should have the date & time combined into one UI component, but separate
components, the former of which I'll focus on here. There are two parts to it:
first is textbox(es), and second a calendar grid. Here are some requirements
that I can think of right now:
- Start of the week. Different regions of the world have the week start on
different days, usually Sunday or Monday, but some start on Saturday. [1] macOS
and Windows both let you change this to any day of the week. On macOS, this is
defined by NSCalendar's firstWeekday.
- Should there be one text field, or should there be three for day-month-year?
Allow the dev to choose? If multiple text boxes, the ways to traverse to the
next field should include the period, space, slash, and dash keys in addition
to the tab key. (This is because people can type 10/10/10 or 10.10.10 all at
once and not have to press tab.) Pasting in a date should be supported in
either case, and converted to the displayed locale.
- The UI should update in response to a notification from the system that the
user has changed their preferred calendar format.
- Either way we have the text box, allowing the developer to choose if they
want a text box with a popup calendar grid or one that is in the same panel
would be ideal. (That is, they add it to the same panel themself.)
- The calendar grid should be able to be oriented horizontally or vertically.
(When the calendar moves around, does it go left-right or up-down?) Calendar
grids often show the previous and next months' dates as padding when the start
and end of the month aren't cleanly cut by the start and ends of the week. When
going horizontally, the developer should have the option to show or hide those
dates. When vertical, the developer should be able to decide if the grid is
continuous or interrupted. (To pad with numbers or to pad with empty space.)
- UI for changing the month and year of the grid. This can take the form of
left-right arrows, scrolling, and/or dropdown for the month and a text field
for the year.
Extra things:
- Calendar type. Most people use Gregorian, but a small number of people can
choose otherwise for their systems. macOS gives me a bunch of options, but
Windows only allows me to do Gregorian. This is a "wow wouldn't it be cool"
optional feature.
- A 'today' button, which selects the current date.
- How to represent a date range with a calendar and a textbox, I'm not sure.
The easy workaround would be to have the developer create two of these date
pickers. But a way to select a range would be welcome.
- If we do also have a component for time, should we allow for the changing of
timezones in the UI? Timezones are too much imo.
I'm relying on screenshots on Google for date pickers and NSDatePicker for what
features they have. I'm sure I would be able to make use of this somewhere in
my own Swing app.
SWinxy
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week__;!!ACWV5N9M2RV99hQ!PUGV28rhgttY2Jyl8p8VAmYPMN-lM1GJT1GBsnZ_vZZ2N2vdraOT_W0xk8aNQnVs-8S5CedYzf0lcDCVFn8J$>
On Thu, Aug 22, 2024 at 2:29 AM Tejesh R
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hello Swing Community,
Swing has a rich set of UI components in the core Java Platform.
But it lacks a Date Picker which is a significant gap for many applications and
so we are considering revisiting the idea of a Date Picker in core Swing.
The function core of a DatePicker is to let a user select a day [and time?], or
range of days [and time ? ],
within optional application specified constraints.
The JXDatePicker component was previously explored as part of the long defunct
external SwingX project.
This proposal does not imply reviving JXDatePicker, but being informed by it
and date pickers for other platforms.
Before even starting on this, we are seeking feedback from the community
- Is it of interest ?
- Would you use it ?
- What features must it have ?
- What features are nice to have ?
- Do you have any experiences of other date pickers that reinforce those
responses ?
- Anything else ?
If we move forward, we would propose a JEP and also expect that we would
deliver it first as a preview feature [1] , so that it may evolve in response
to feedback before becoming final.
Please let us know your thoughts and suggestions on this proposal.
Regards,
Tejesh R.
JDK client team
[1] https://openjdk.org/jeps/12
