This package is maintained as part of the minifx organization on github. The main web page of minifx can be found here.

Motivation

This library simplifies fxml loading by conventions.

The basic ideas for this small library are the same than that of Adam Biens afterburner.fx: fxml files, their controllers and (optionally) css files are loaded by naming conventions. However, this library provides a bit more finegrained control over the objects to be injected into the controller objects themselves.

Requirements

From the 2.0.0 version onwards, this library requires java 11. Lower versions require java 8.

Getting Started

To use minifx-fxml in your applications you have to add one of the following to your build files:

Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.minifx</groupId>
    <artifactId>minifx-fxml</artifactId>
    <version>X.Y.Z</version>
</dependency>

Gradle:

compile 'org.minifx:minifx-fxml:X.Y.Z'

Hereby X.Y.Z is the latest version which can be found at the top of this page.

The Conventions

As in afterburner, always the following files (assuming to be in the same package) belong together and will be loaded together by convention:

• AnyView.fxml (mandatory)
• AnyViewController.java (mandatory)
• AnyView.css

HereAnyView has to be read as a placeholder for any other name.

NOTE

AnyViewController has to be also set as value for the xml attribute fx:controller within the AnyView.fxml file. This is in some cases a bit redundant.

FxmlMagicNodes - Common Use Cases

The starting point for fluent clauses for the most common use cases to load views from fxml are provided by the FxmlMagicNodes class.

Isolated Model

As all the required information is contained in the fxml file, we can simply load the view by:

Parent anyView = FxmlMagicNodes.isolatedWiredNode().fromFxml("/path/to/AnyView.fxml");

This will load the view defined in fxml file, assuming the following simple conventions:

• A new instance of the controller is created, assuming that the controller class has a now argument constructor. If this is not the case, the loading will fail.
• All fields which are annotated with the @Inject annotation are wired also by constructing new instances using new argument constructors. This is done recursively. (We refer to those injected objects as the “model” in the following)
• Nested views are supported and constructed the same way.
• If a css file following the naming convention is available, it will also be loaded.

This implies that if another view of the same type would be created, then the two views would not share any information. This is a good assumption for many cases.

The same can be achieved by using the the controller class as parameter, which might be easier and/or more refactoring safe:

Parent anyView = FxmlMagicNodes.isolatedWiredNode().byConventionFrom(AnyViewController.class);

Shared Model

In some other cases it is desirable to share models between views. In the extreme case that all model objects of the same type shall be shared between views in the same jvm, the following can be used:

Parent anyView = FxmlMagicNodes.globallyWiredNode().fromFxml("/path/to/AnyView.fxml");

This means that, if a second instance of the same view would be created all the model objects would be shared between them.

NOTE

The Controllers themselves are still instantiated per view instance! Otherwise a proper binding between xml and controllers is not possible.

FxmlNodeBuilders - fine tuning node creation

Starting points for builder fluent clauses with more fine-grained control over the injected instances are housed in the FxmlNodeBuilders class. On purpose, with these builders, no defaults are assumed and all information has to be always provided.

The main two required information parts are:

• From which files to load the view
• How to inject controllers and model objects (herein lays the big variation range)

The equivalent of our first example, this time using builders would be:

Parent anyView = FxmlNodeBuilders.fromFxml("/path/to/AnyView.fxml")
                                 .controllersFrom(ModelSharingControllerFactory.newDefault())
                                 .build();

The main new concept here is the ControllerFactory, who is responsible for creating the instances for controllers and model objects.

NOTE

Despite the used factory is called ModelSharingControllerFactory, it only shares the model objects if it is reused. Therefore, as we use a new instance here, it creates an isolated node. All in your hands here ;-)

Other options here are:

factory clause	effect
controllersFrom(Callback<Class<?>, Object> controllerFactory)	retrieve the controllers and model objects from the passed int callback (e.g. a lambda expression)
controllers(Iterable<?> controllerInstances)	pick the controllers from the iterable if their final class is the required one
controllers(Object... controllerInstances)	convenience method for the above one

Build Artifacts of the Latest Version

• dependency license report
• junit test report
• jacoco test report
• javadoc