The window appeared. The JTable loaded. He stared.
His first attempt at a wrapping renderer threw an exception. His second attempt rendered, but every cell in the column was the same height—the height of the tallest cell in the entire table. That meant rows with one-word descriptions had massive, ugly empty spaces. His third attempt flickered violently whenever the table was resized. Java Swing - JTable Text Alignment And Column W...
But he also felt a strange sense of pride. He hadn't just used a library. He had understood the TableModel , the TableColumnModel , the intricacies of TableCellRenderer , and the relationship between JTable and JTextArea . He had touched the bare metal of desktop UI programming. The window appeared
DefaultTableCellRenderer rightRenderer = new DefaultTableCellRenderer(); rightRenderer.setHorizontalAlignment(SwingConstants.RIGHT); for (int i = 0; i < table.getColumnCount(); i++) He ran the program. The numbers snapped to the right. A wave of relief washed over him. He leaned back, cracked his knuckles, and reached for his cold coffee. He took a sip. It was disgusting. He didn't care. Problem solved. His first attempt at a wrapping renderer threw an exception
He resized the Description column by dragging the header. The text rewrapped in real-time , adjusting to the new width like water finding its level.
He wrote the class by hand, line by line, feeling like a scribe copying a lost manuscript. He added a JList of JTextArea objects as a cache to improve performance. He calculated the row height dynamically in the JTable 's prepareRenderer method.
He looked at the Description column. A long sentence stretched across multiple lines, wrapping neatly at the column boundary, pushing the row taller just enough to contain it. The next row, with a short description, was shorter. The row heights were dynamic. Perfect. Beautiful.