CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaswingmodel-view-controller
T_01
T_01

Reputation: 1359

swing and mvc - where place the listener

I'm trying to program an swing application and learn something about the mvc pattern. Also I want to keep my Swing Code clean, so I split up my GUI in different classes. A part of this class structure looks like this:

//all classes extending BasicGuiElement
-EntireContentElement  has:
---ControlElement  has:
------MainMenuElement

MainMenuElement contains the MainMenuBar, the Menu's and the MenuItems. Now, different MenuItems need different ActionListeners.

And here is my Problem: Where should this ActionListener's come from? Should i create the EntireControlElement in the View, to which i pass an HashMap and also pass this map through all the elements to MainMenuElement? And if i have many classes who all needs a bunch of action listeners, i would pass a list of listener maps? That would be really ugly code, would'nt it?

Another solution would be to pass the Model as the ModelInterface to the View, and call model methods from the action listeners, which would be created in the view classes... would that be a nicer approach?

Thank you!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1255

Answers (1)

splungebob
splungebob

Reputation: 5415

As an alternative to @MadProgrammer's nice example in his comment, there's a lesser known pattern called MVP (Model-View-Presenter). It's a variant of traditional MVC where the goal is to make the view as dumb as possible (no knowledge or references to models, controllers, or any other application code) so that all code to be tested is out of the GUI.

To answer your question using MVP, the Model is "stand-alone" and knows nothing of Views or Presenters/Controllers. Likewise, the View is also "stand-alone" and knows nothing about Models or Presenters/Controllers. The Presenter is a bridge between both who injects listener logic into the View.

For compare/contrast, there's an MVP example that can be seen here, that is a rewrite of an MVC example seen here.

See also:

Wiki: Model-View-Presenter

ObjectMentor: The Humble Dialog Box

Upvotes: 2

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