JFace TableViewer sorting via Drag and Drop

Recently I wanted to sort elements in a TableViewer via drag and drop and was astonished that I could not find  existing helper classes or tutorial for this fairly trivial use case. So here is one for you in case you got the same use case.

Source code for this tutorial is available on github as a single zip archive, as a Team Project Set or you can browse the files online.

If you are just interested in the helper class, have a look at DnDSortingSupport.

Prerequisites:

To have something to work on I will start with a TableViewer containing some data stored in a java.util.List. It is a default TableViewer and therefore I expect you have something similar ready for your experiments.

Step 1: Add drag support

Drag and Drop support for SWT is implemented via DragSource and DropTarget instances. To define that we can drag data, we need to bind a DragSource to a Control.

  DragSource dragSource = new DragSource(tableViewer.getControl(), DND.DROP_MOVE);
  dragSource.setTransfer(LocalSelectionTransfer.getTransfer());
  dragSource.addDragListener(new DragSourceAdapter() {

   @Override
   public void dragStart(DragSourceEvent event) {
    event.doit = !tableViewer.getStructuredSelection().isEmpty();
   }

   @Override
   public void dragSetData(DragSourceEvent event) {
    if (LocalSelectionTransfer.getTransfer().isSupportedType(event.dataType)) {
     LocalSelectionTransfer.getTransfer().setSelection(tableViewer.getStructuredSelection());
     LocalSelectionTransfer.getTransfer().setSelectionSetTime(event.time & 0xFFFF);
    }
   }

   @Override
   public void dragFinished(DragSourceEvent event) {
    LocalSelectionTransfer.getTransfer().setSelection(null);
    LocalSelectionTransfer.getTransfer().setSelectionSetTime(0);
   }
  });

In line 1 we create the DragSource and define allowed DnD operations. As we want to sort elements, we only allow DND.MOVE operations. Then we define the way data gets transferred from the DragSource to the DropTarget. As we stay within  the same Eclipse application we may use a LocalSelectionTransfer.

The first thing that happens on a drag is dragStart(). Technically the selection cannot be empty as we have to select something before we start the operation, so this implementation is merely to understand how we could deny the operation right from the start.

After the drop operation got accepted in the DropTarget (see below) we get asked to dragSetData() and define what data we are moving. setSelectionSetTime() is not needed by our DropTarget, so again this is for completeness only.

Finally we need to clean up after the operation is done.

Step 2: Add drop support

Implementation is similar like before, just now we need a DropTarget. Instead of writing our own DropTargetListener we may use a ViewerDropAdapter which covers most of the required work already.

  DropTarget dropTarget = new DropTarget(tableViewer.getControl(), DND.DROP_MOVE);
  dropTarget.setTransfer(LocalSelectionTransfer.getTransfer());
  dropTarget.addDropListener(new ViewerDropAdapter(tableViewer) {

   @Override
   public void dragEnter(DropTargetEvent event) {
    // make sure drag was triggered from current tableViewer
    if (event.widget instanceof DropTarget) {
     boolean isSameViewer = tableViewer.getControl().equals(((DropTarget) event.widget).getControl());
     if (isSameViewer) {
      event.detail = DND.DROP_MOVE;
      setSelectionFeedbackEnabled(false);
      super.dragEnter(event);
     } else
      event.detail = DND.DROP_NONE;
    } else
     event.detail = DND.DROP_NONE;
   }

   @Override
   public boolean validateDrop(Object target, int operation, TransferData transferType) {
    return true;
   }

   @Override
   public boolean performDrop(Object target) {
    int location = determineLocation(getCurrentEvent());
    if (location == LOCATION_BEFORE) {
     if (modelManipulator.insertBefore(getSelectedElement(), getCurrentTarget())) {
      tableViewer.refresh();
      return true;
     }

    } else if (location == LOCATION_AFTER) {
     if (modelManipulator.insertAfter(getSelectedElement(), getCurrentTarget())) {
      tableViewer.refresh();
      return true;
     }
    }

    return false;
   }

   private Object getSelectedElement() {
    return ((IStructuredSelection) LocalSelectionTransfer.getTransfer().getSelection()).getFirstElement();
   }
  });

dragEnter() is the first thing that happens on the drop part of DnD. The default implementation is already fine. Our implementation additionally checks that the drag source is our current TableViewer. Further we disable the selectionFeedback. The feedback visually shows the user whether we drop before an element, on the element, or after it. The ViewerDropAdapter already supports these kind of feedbacks. Until bug 545733 gets fixed the helper class contains a small patch to provide before/after feedback only. It does not make sense to drop on another element when we do sorting, right?

validateDrop() will be queried multiple times. We might check that we do not drop the table element on itself, but we spared this check for the current example.

performDrop() finally implements the drop operation. To keep the helper class generic I used an interface that allows to insert elements before or after another element. An implementation of it needs to be passed to the helper class.

 public interface IModelManipulator {
  boolean insertBefore(Object source, Object target);

  boolean insertAfter(Object source, Object target);
 }

The helper class comes with an implementation for java.util.List, which you may reuse.