Waxing Cerebral

The Swing GUI editor in NetBeans is great. It has a number of samples to build from as well, one of which is the Master/Detail template. That's an example of one that generates a JPanel, and I wanted to convert to a JFrame. Here are the steps, assuming a form named NewForm (with NetBeans 6.5):

1. In NewForm.java:
   1. Change extends JPanel to extends JFrame.
   2. Change the static void main.. method content to be:
      java.awt.EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
      public void run() {
      new NewForm().setVisible(true);
      }
      });


2. In NewForm.form (may need to edit this outside of NetBeans):
   1. Change the type attribute of Form (near the top) from type="org.netbeans.modules.form.forminfo.JPanelFormInfo" to type="org.netbeans.modules.form.forminfo.JFrameFormInfo".
   
   


3. In the graphical editor, select the Frame and choose the Code tab. Under Form Size Policy, change to Generate pack().

That should be it, good to go. May need to recompile, and/or open close the form to get NetBeans to recognise the changes.

It's great that CheckPoint has a SecureClient for the Mac. It works really well. What doesn't work, is making it stop.

There is no way to prevent it booting at startup. Oh, there are ways referred to by CheckPoint's docs, but as they say in the fine print, that just stops the gui from starting - any security policies (read: complete firewall lockdown) will still be in place. And if you do have the gui up and choose 'Stop VPN-1 SecureClient', again it's only the gui that goes, and you go mad like me having lost your svn, http, etc server, not knowing why. There are ways to control it via the command line which you could script, but your admins have to have allowed it to allow that via some centralised settings at their end.

So, if you do need SC, always launch the gui. If you need access to services on that box, then always choose 'Tools>Disable Security Policy' in SC. And if you don't need it anymore, then say goodbye to it, like I'm about to do.

I'm sure there's a better design methodology to do this, but I have an issue in Java where the PostgreSQL JDBC driver can't execute createBlob() (in JDBC3 spec), so I want to overwrite its Connection. I can't subclass it, as it's returned from the call DriverManager.getConnection(...). So what I need to do is use the Wrapper design pattern, aka Decorator, aka Delegator. Oh wouldn't it be great to use via? But alas, until my cry is heard, or someone corrects me, the solution is to:

1. Create a new class that also implements Connection.
2. Use this class to wrap the obtained PostgreSQLConnection
3. Painstakingly implement each and every method in Connection to pass through to the wrapped connection, except for the methods I want to meddle with.
4. Pass out of my Connection-obtainer class, not the raw Connection, but my new wrapper.
5. Accept resignedly that when the Connection interface changes, my Connection wrapper will now not fulfil the new interface and will break. Really good reason for via.

So enough whinging. In Eclipse, it is just a matter of creating a new class, and implementing Connection. If the methods didn't appear then the class name will have an error; Ctrl+1 on this gives the option 'Add unimplemented methods'. And there they will be, all 50 of them (rough count), ready to type this.connection.blah() in each. But hey, Eclipse can do multiline regex finds, and we can use regular expressions in the find and replace, so....

To fix all wrapped method calls that return a value:
In the new class, Ctrl-F to bring up the find/replace dialog. Make sure 'Wrap search' and 'Regular expression' are ticked, and 'Scope' is 'All', then copy and paste into Find:

This searches for any lines having the word public, not followed by class, and having a return statement.
Hit Find a few times to validate it's matching correctly.

Now, in Replace:

Takes the first match (\1) and appends the method call (\2) to the field name.

Click 'Replace All' to see it happen.

To fix the remaining method calls with no return value (ie void)
In Find:

Now, in Replace:

And 'Replace All' again.

As yet the above regex statements don't remove parameter types from the calling statements, so you will have to go through and remove them, but that should be relatively little work.