Enhancement to converters?

Hello there,

I recently got in the GUI buisiness again and I'm glad to write some 
swixml code again :).

During this, I stumbled across a little problem: I would like to use a 
custom renderer to one of my lists. I'm aware of the procedure swixml 
gets access to the attributes of the created objects. In short, if there 
is a setxxxx-method for a given GUI object, one might use the 
xxxx-attribute in ones xml GUI description file. But as far as I 
understand the mechanism in org.swixml.Parser, this is of no use for 
renderers at all: I'm not able to use cellrenderer="fieldOfCallingClass" 
(to have the cell-renderer assigned from a field in the class calling 
swingEngine.render(...) nor 
cellrenderer="fullQualifiedClassNameForRendererClass" (to have the cell 
renderer created using the FQN of the cell renderer class).

First I tried to write a Converter for this. This may work for the 
second case (the cellrenderer-attribute tells the classname to create an 
object from) but not the first case. So I wrote my own converter 
interface (EnhancedConverter) and changed the call to convert(Class, 
Attribute, Localizer) in the Parser class to convert(Class, Attribute, 
SwingEngine) if the converter is a EnhancedConverter. By getting access 
to the actual SwingEngine, the convert-method is able to fetch attribute 
values from the calling class. If there is need to access the Localizer, 
just use swingEngine.getLocalizer()...

Of course I'm able to write my own tag and thus implementing the access 
to the cell renderer. But IMHO cell renderers are pure GUI related 
things and usually they are created using the standard constructor. So 
(first), why bother in the program *which* cell renderer to use? Second, 
the current behaviour of setCellRenderer is of no practical use, is'nt 
it? Third, there is no workaround like the use of initclass (because 
there is neither no Jxxxx (xxxx: one of List,Table,Tree,...) with a 
*renderer* as argument...)

Please tell me what you think about the problem and if someone is 
interested in the enhancements I made. Or tell me I wasted my time and 
should go and write my own custom tag for this nifty problem :-/

Yours,

Frank

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