A small but versatile framework for speeding up development of JavaFX and FXML applications: use a declarative syntax for binding actions to the UI controls, for a clean separation of logic and presentation and more fun with JavaFX.
Goal of the fx-actions project is to provide Java developers with a easy-to-use framework for implementing application logic in action classes and declaratively wiring them to an FXML UI, i.e., you create the UI with FXML, declare the UI controls in the controller class and simply annotate them with your action classes. No more writing lots of lines for creating event handlers!
The project is open source, the code is made available under LGPL 2.1.
At first, consider some standard FXML UI and it's controller. There would be an fx:id in the FXML, containing MenuItem and Button instance that we want to wire the action logic to:
<AnchorPane ... fx:controller="my.app.FXMLDocumentController">
<children>
<MenuBar>
<menus>
<Menu>
<items>
<MenuItem fx:id="miAction" />
</items>
</Menu>
</menus>
</MenuBar>
<Button fx:id="button" />
...Note: you do not need to declare any handler methods in the FXML! Action logic should be encapsulated, and not tied to a controller class. Also, action logic is a part of the controller tier, not a part of the UI. So, the controller would need only fields for referencing the button and the menu item.
Next, you put your logic in action classes. Actions should be executed asynchronously, so we would need take care of multithreading, e.g., with JavaFX tasks or services. With fx-actions, you do not need to handle this yourself, all you need to do is to extend the base class FXAbstractAction:
public class MyAction extends FXAbstractAction{
public MyAction() {
this.setText("Go!");
}
@Override
public void onAction(Event event){
System.out.println("... and here goes the logic!");
}
}After describing the UI with FXML and implementing the action, let's put it together. The wiring is done declaratively, only with annotations in the controller. You simple annotate any button or menu item (also labels!) that should trigger the action with @FXAction and the action class:
public class FXMLDocumentController implements Initializable {
@FXML
@FXAction(action = MyAction.class)
private Button button;
@FXML
@FXAction(action = MyAction.class)
private MenuItem miAction;
// ...
}OK, at last there needs to be shed some light on the necessary initialization. The controllers need to be scanned for the annotations. The fx-actions framework currently is initialized with two additional lines of code and a small modification in the FXMLLoader invocation. An FXActionManager needs to be instantiated and used as a controller factory when loading the FXML UI. After loading the UI, the action manager initializes the actions.
myActionControllerFactory = new FXActionManager();
FXMLLoader fxmlLoader = new FXMLLoader();
fxmlLoader.setLocation(getClass().getResource("FXMLDocument.fxml"));
fxmlLoader.setControllerFactory(myActionControllerFactory);
Parent root = (Parent) fxmlLoader.load();
myActionControllerFactory.initActions();That's it! Soon there will be more information in the wiki pages, e.g. on
- Setting action properties like caption, tooltips and icons
- enabling and disabling actions with bindings
- binding actions to keyboard shortcuts
- ...
2019-03-21 The project gets upgraded to JDK11 and JavaFX 11. Created the javafx8-branch for the old sources.
2018-02-18 Project cleanup, is now a plan Java library Project for NetBeans IDE, but can be build also with Ant from the command line. Added unit tests using Mockito 2.15.4 and aeFXUnit.
2016-03-06 Added multi-behaviour handler and docs.
2016-03-03 Default Image of FXActions is now overridable per annotation attribute.
2016-10-31 Support for ADD and ASSIGN mode in behaviour.
2015-05-04 New project description online, minor updates in code and javadocs.
2014-09-16 License decision made, it is LGPL 2.1.
2014-07-14 The repository has been just created. Code follows!