Hi all, I know we're very late in the release, but I'm proposing the addition of one new method to the TableSelectionModel abstract class, which will have implementations provided by TableView and TreeTableView. The method added into TableSelectionModel will be a no-op method by default (to hopefully not break anyone), and I propose it should have the following method signature:
public void selectRange(int minRow, int minColumn, int maxRow, int maxColumn) This method will be used internally, and by any interested end user, to signal to the TableView/TreeTableView control to select all cells within the range of (minRow, minColumn) -> (maxRow, maxColumn), inclusive. The reason why I want to introduce this is summed up well in RT-33442 and RT-33619. In short, given a big enough table, a shift+click can essentially cause the TableView to hang whilst it selects all the cells within the range. This is basically due to all the selection events overloading the system. The benefit of introducing this method is that I can make the selection essentially an atomic operation, which will result in drastically less event noise. To better understand what I mean, there is a patch attached to RT-33442 (rt33442_2.patch). This patch introduces this change, as well as a number of other implementation changes. In doing so the selection performance in this use case goes from crashing my test application (presumably it would complete, but I give up after five minutes of waiting) to taking under 1 second. There is still more testing to be done, but after applying this patch all controls unit tests continue to pass. Also, as noted in the jira issue, this patch is incomplete as I have not ported the patch to also cover TreeTableView. So, after all that, should we add selectRange(minRow, minColumn, maxRow, maxColumn) to JavaFX 8.0? If so, does anyone have an improved method signature they can recommend? I will of course be writing unit tests to cover this method and testing to ensure there are no regressions as best I can. Thanks, -- Jonathan
