swing-forms

The swing-forms library was initially developed and maintained as a separate library, but has been absorbed into swing-extras as of the 2.0.0 release, to make maintenance and extension much easier.

swing-forms is greatly useful in saving you from having to write a lot of manual layout code for input forms, particularly with GridBagLayout, which can be complicated and tedious to use. With swing-forms, you can very quickly stand up an input form with optional validation rules and with optional actions attached to each form field. You can also easily extend swing-forms by writing your own custom form field implementations.

What can I do with swing-forms?

The swing-forms library wraps most of the common input components into easy-to-use wrapper classes and hides much of the complexity of using them. Included example form field implementations are:

• Checkbox
• Color picker (with support for solid colors and for color gradients)
• Combo box (editable and non-editable variants)
• File chooser
• Directory chooser
• Static label fields
• Number pickers (spinners)
• Text input fields (single-line and multiline supported)
• Multi-select list fields
• Panel fields (for rendering custom stuff)

In the next few sections, we'll take a tour of the features provided by swing-forms, and we will be making use of these features in most of the rest of this documentation, because many of the other features included in swing-extras build on top of swing-forms.