Hiding Tabs for Undocked TopComponents

In our NetBeans Platform application, we have a TopComponent that needs to always be opened in an undocked and maximised state. When I manually undocked the window the first time though, I immediately noticed that the single tab that appears in the window just looks really silly.

So I set out to get the window to automatically undock as well as to remove that annoying tab.

In order to get the window to be opened as undocked, I needed to define a new separated mode to dock the window into. See section 3 of Geertjan’s Secrets of the NetBeans Window System post for more details about the mode. Note that the mode’s kind property needs to be editor for the whole thing to work.

I called my new mode floater, and the code that opens and maximises the window now looked like this:

[java]Mode floater = WindowManager.getDefault().findMode(“floater”);
TopComponent tc =
WindowManager.getDefault().findTopComponent(“test2TopComponent”);
floater.dockInto(tc);
tc.open();
JFrame root = (JFrame) SwingUtilities.getRoot(tc);
root.setExtendedState(root.getExtendedState() | Frame.MAXIMIZED_BOTH);[/java]

But the pesky tab was of course still there, so I needed more information. And in my search I came across another of Geertjan’s articles – Farewell to Space Consuming Weird Tabs. I did, however, not want to remove all the tabs from the whole application, just that particular one. So after creating the class test.NoTabsTabDisplayerUI as Geertjan describes, I had to find the right spot to set the UIManager property. And as it turns out, I just had to set the property before opening the window, and reset it to its previous value after. So the code finally is:

[java]Mode floater = WindowManager.getDefault().findMode(“floater”);
Object oldTabDisplayer = UIManager.get(“EditorTabDisplayerUI”);
UIManager.put(“EditorTabDisplayerUI”, “test.NoTabsTabDisplayerUI”);
TopComponent tc =
WindowManager.getDefault().findTopComponent(“test2TopComponent”);
floater.dockInto(tc);
tc.open();
JFrame root = (JFrame) SwingUtilities.getRoot(tc);
root.setExtendedState(root.getExtendedState() | Frame.MAXIMIZED_BOTH);
UIManager.put(“EditorTabDisplayerUI”, oldTabDisplayer);[/java]

Hermien Pellissier

Instructional designer, educational technologist and occasional lecturer who loves travel and photography