JavaFX TableView performance issue

Question

I am using javafx table view control to display my table data. Now the data is quite huge and when I show the full data in the control it crashes. Is there any way to do so or will I have to cache the data so that I can display it in chunks. Should I use JTable instead ?

Answer 1

I made a lazy-load on tableview using the CellFactory class... I´ll try to explain, anyone with better english than mine fell free to edit and make it more understandable!

First I use a mandatory property in a Bean to check if that bean has already been loaded or not. This way I don't need to create an attribute specifically for that.

Second, I loaded into TableView my Bean collection just with the 'id' property loaded, what makes my table display all in blank.

At last, I create a CellFactory, like this one below, to check if object has loaded or not, and if not do it now.

namecolumn.setCellFactory(new Callback<TableColumn<PersonBean, String>, TableCell<PersonBean, String>>() {
@Override
  public TableCell<PersonBean, String> call(TableColumn<PersonBean, String> param) {
    TableCell<PersonBean, String> newtablecell = new TableCell<PersonBean, String>() {
      @Override
      protected void updateItem(String item, boolean empty) {
        // Since I got some strange errors when method getIndex() return greatter value than my collection size, I need to validate before getting the object
        if (getIndex() < getItems().size()) {
          //Retrieve the collection object
          PersonBean personbean = getItems().get(getIndex());
          // Name is mandatory, so if it is null my bean was not loaded yet
          if (personbean.getName() == null) {
            // Call other centralized method to make load, details explained later
            loadPersonBean(personbean);
          }
          // Now I put the value on TableCell. Remember "item" still empty so we need to use Bean
          setText(personbean.getName());
          setAlignment(Pos.CENTER);
        }
      }
    };
    return newtablecell;
  }
});

In the method loadPersonBean I pass the object contained in TableView Collection and load it from DataBase. Than I COPY all the needed data to the bean received from the table. I didn't try to swap the object in TableView, but I believe it may result a Concurrent Exception.

Other observation: In all my tests TableView always respects the column order to call my CellFactory, but I did not test if it still respects the order if user swap the column order. So I prefer to add a CellFactory with the "LazyLoadCheck" part of code to all columns.

Hope I made my self clear enough to help! If any questions remains, comment and I'll try to do a better explanation.