View source for Tables And Trees And NativeControls

== The Problem ==

People often face the problem that they want to show native controls into Tables and Trees.

Common use cases are:
* CheckBox-Widget in column other than the first one
* Radio-Boxes, Buttons

== The Solutions to the problem ==
=== SWT: Place SWT-Controls into the Tree/Table-Widget [http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.swt.snippets/src/org/eclipse/swt/snippets/Snippet126.java?view=co Snippet] ===
The main drawback is that you will allocate a resource for every cell that you display, even if the
cell is not shown. This happens because SWT does not inform you which controls are in/out of your view-area. For discussion and a possible solution take a look at this [http://tom-eclipse-dev.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-items-are-visible-in-tabletree.html blog post]. 
There is a feature request for JFace to provide support for native controls in TreeViewer/TableViewer (see [https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=36977 JFace-Feature-Request]). The JFace 3.3 API provides the needed bits, as the example attached to the bug shows, but to summarize, using Native-Controls is not a good solution.

=== SWT: Use Images instead of Widgets ===
This solution is fairly straight forward if you provide Images instead of Native-Widgets you'll only have to allocate the image once and reuse it everywhere. This way your resource allocation count is very low and table/tree performance is much better. Many people have not used this possibility because they thought that this would break the platform L&F which was one of things they abandoned Swing and switched to SWT. But this limitation can be overcome fairly easy by caputuring a Screen-Shot from the Control on the fly and presenting it. So the Widget looks as native as possible (without the hover-effects currently). The solution is presented in this [http://tom-eclipse-dev.blogspot.com/2007/01/tableviewers-and-nativelooking.html Blog-Entry]. Another advantage is that this plays nicely with the JFace-Viewer-Framework.

=== SWT: Use Owner Draw ===
Since 3.2 you can but your Table/Tree into OwnerDraw mode and draw the cell contents yourself. This way you can draw a faked button, ... in any control. Since 3.3 JFace provides API to easily use OwnerDraw in combination with LabelProviders. For more information on Owner Draw please refer to this [http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-CustomDrawingTableAndTreeItems/customDraw.htm Article] and [http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.jface.snippets/Eclipse%20JFace%20Snippets/org/eclipse/jface/snippets/viewers/ JFace Snippets]

=== Nebula: Use CompositeTable ===
The nebula project contains a control who mimics a Table using native widgets and to try to bring the resource allocation count down to a useable number it reuses controls and only holds these ones currently shown. For more detailed information and status of this widget please ask at the nebula-newsgroup (search the newsgroup and nebula-dev-mailing list about known limitations and possible work-arounds). A known draw back currently is that CompositeTable doesn't provide a JFace-Viewer-API. Examples can be found [http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.swt.nebula/org.eclipse.swt.nebula.snippets/src/org/eclipse/swt/nebula/snippets/compositetable/?root=Technology_Project here]

=== Nebula: Use Grid ===
The Grid-Control is also custom drawn and you can even customize it by deploying your own renders (besides that it has many other cool features not part of SWT-Tree/SWT-Table). When using 3.3 you even have the possibility to use JFace-Viewers. For more information and status please ask at the nebula-newsgroup. For examples can be found [http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.swt.nebula/org.eclipse.swt.nebula.snippets/src/org/eclipse/swt/nebula/snippets/grid/?root=Technology_Project here] and [http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.swt.nebula/org.eclipse.swt.nebula.snippets/src/org/eclipse/nebula/snippets/gridviewer/?root=Technology_Project here]. Checkboxes in arbitary columns are supported out of the box.