Java Swing: JList with ListCellRenderer selected item different height

Question

I'm making a custom ListCellRenderer. I know that you can have different dimensions for each individual cell. But now I want to have a different dimension for the selected cell. Somehow, the JList is caching the dimension for each individual cell the first time it has to calculate bounds for each cell. This is my code:

public class Test {

    static class Oh extends JPanel {

        public Oh() {
            setPreferredSize(new Dimension(100, 20));
        }

        protected void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
            super.paintComponent(g);
            g.setColor(Color.WHITE);
            g.fillRect(0, 0, getWidth(), getHeight());
        }
    }

    static class Yeah extends JPanel {
        private boolean isSelected;

        public Yeah(boolean isSelected) {
            setPreferredSize(new Dimension(100, 100));
            this.isSelected = isSelected;
        }

        protected void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
            super.paintComponent(g);
            //setSize(100, 100); // doesn't change the bounds of the component
            //setBounds(0, 0, 100, 100); // this doesn't do any good either.
            if (isSelected) g.setColor(Color.GREEN);
            else g.setColor(Color.BLACK);
            g.fillRect(0, 0, getWidth(), getHeight());
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        JFrame f = new JFrame();
        f.setDefaultCloseOperation(WindowConstants.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        f.setSize(800, 500);
        Vector<Integer> ints = new Vector<Integer>();
        for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
            ints.add(i);
        }
        JList list = new JList(ints);
        list.setCellRenderer(new ListCellRenderer() {
            public Component getListCellRendererComponent(JList list, Object value, int index, boolean isSelected, boolean cellHasFocus) {
                if (isSelected || ((Integer) value) == 42) return new Yeah(isSelected);
                else return new Oh();
            }
        });
        //list.setPrototypeCellValue(null);
        //list.setFixedCellHeight(-1);
        f.add(new JScrollPane(list));
        f.setVisible(true);
    }
}

In the comments you can see what I've already tried.

I've already searched quite long and found a lot of useless articles, some of them touch the ListCellRenderer/dynamic height thing, but they only work because the height stays the same for the individual cells. My heights are changing, so how do I do this?

Answer 1

Basically, there are two aspects of the problem, both located in the ui delegate

• it fails to configure the renderer to its real state when measuring, that is ignores the selection (and focus) completely
• it is notoriously stubborn against being forced to re-calculate the cached cell sizes: it has no public api to do so and only does voluntarily on model changes.

The remedy to fix the first is indeed the renderer: implement to ignore the given selected flag and query the list for the real selection, as outlined by @Andy. In code, using the OP's components

ListCellRenderer renderer = new ListCellRenderer() {
    Yeah yeah = new Yeah(false);
    Oh oh = new Oh();

    @Override
    public Component getListCellRendererComponent(JList list,
            Object value, int index, boolean isSelected,
            boolean cellHasFocus) {
        // ignore the given selection index, query the list instead
        if (list != null) {
            isSelected = list.isSelectedIndex(index);
        }
        if (isSelected || ((Integer) value) == 42) {
            yeah.isSelected = isSelected;
            return yeah;

        }
        return oh;
    }
};
list.setCellRenderer(renderer);

To fix the second, a custom ui delegate (as suggested in others answers as well) is a possible solution. Though some work in the general case, if supporting multiple LAFs is needed.

A less intrusive but slightly dirty method to force the ui into voluntarily update its cache is to send a fake ListDataEvent on selectionChange:

ListSelectionListener l = new ListSelectionListener() {
    ListDataEvent fake = new ListDataEvent(list, ListDataEvent.CONTENTS_CHANGED, -1, -1);
    @Override
    public void valueChanged(ListSelectionEvent e) {
        JList list = (JList) e.getSource();
        ListDataListener[] listeners = ((AbstractListModel) list.getModel())
                .getListDataListeners();
        for (ListDataListener l : listeners) {
            if (l.getClass().getName().contains("ListUI")) {
                l.contentsChanged(fake);
                break;
            }
        }
    }
};
list.addListSelectionListener(l);

BTW, JXList of the SwingX project has a custom ui delegate - mainly for supporting sorting/filtering - with public api to re-calculate the cache, then the above ListSelectionListener would be simplified (and clean :-) to

    ListSelectionListener l = new ListSelectionListener() {
        @Override
        public void valueChanged(ListSelectionEvent e) {
            ((JXList) e.getSource()).invalidateCellSizeCache();
        }
    };
    list.addListSelectionListener(l);

Answer 2

I just implemented this feature. The problem is, that the cell renderer is asked twice for rendering a cell. In the first round all list entries are rendered without selection, then the selected cells are rendered again using selection. So if you provide a preferred size in the first round, it is cached and also used for the second round.

The trick is to ignore the isSelected boolean parameter in the getListCellRendererComponent and to figure out the selection state by checking if list.getSelectedIndices() contains the given index.

But, I still have the problem, that after the list is made visible, the height of the rendered components are sometimes to large/small. After resizing the list by mouse everything is fine again. I played around with validate/revalidate, repaint, reset of cached heights, but nothing worked. Swing is sometimes a bit strange...