Customize JavaFX ListViews with Ease

Display Custom Items in JavaFX ListView

The JavaFX ListView is an important UI control that displays a list of items. It is often used to display a set of items from which one or more may be selected by the user. In some cases, it is necessary to show custom items instead of simple strings in the ListView. This article will demonstrate how to create a custom ListView item in JavaFX.

Create a Custom Item Class

The first step when creating a custom ListView item is to define a custom class that represents the item. This class should extend the JavaFX javafx.scene.control.ListCell class and override its updateItem() method. The updateItem() method takes an item of type T and updates the ListCell. For example, if we want to display a Person object in the ListView, our custom ListCell class should look like this:

public class PersonListCell extends ListCell<Person> {
    //Override the updateItem() method
    @Override
    public void updateItem(Person person, boolean empty) {
        //Call the superclass method
        super.updateItem(person, empty);
        //Check if the item is not empty
        if (!empty) {
            //Set the ListCell text and graphic
            setText(person.getName());
            setGraphic(person.getImageView());
        }
    }
}

In this example, we are overriding the updateItem() method to set the text of the ListCell to the Person's name and the graphic to the Person's ImageView. In other words, when the PersonListCell is displayed in the ListView, it will display the Person's name and image.

Create a Custom Cell Factory

Once we have created our custom ListCell class, we need to create a custom cell factory to use it. A cell factory is responsible for creating each cell in the ListView. To create a custom cell factory, we need to define a class that implements the Callback interface. For example, here is a custom cell factory for the PersonListCell:

public class PersonCellFactory implements Callback<ListView<Person>, ListCell<Person>> {
    @Override
    public ListCell<Person> call(ListView<Person> listView) {
        return new PersonListCell();
    }
}

In this example, the call() method will simply return an instance of the PersonListCell class (which we created in the previous step).

Set the Custom Cell Factory

Now that we have defined our custom cell factory, we can attach it to our ListView. To do this, we simply need to call the setCellFactory() method on the ListView and pass in the custom cell factory. Here is an example of how this looks:

ListView<Person> listView = new ListView<>();
listView.setCellFactory(new PersonCellFactory());

The setCellFactory() method will then use the custom cell factory to create each cell in the ListView. This will ensure that each item in the ListView is displayed using our custom PersonListCell class.

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at how to display custom items in a JavaFX ListView. We saw how to create a custom ListCell class to represent each item in the ListView and how to create a custom cell factory to use the custom ListCell class. Hopefully, this article has provided a good overview of how to display custom items in a JavaFX ListView.