Eclipse Tips

Adding an Input Prompt to a text control is most common in web applications. Today I happened to see a JavaScript that handles this elegantly. The script itself is just 18 lines and using it requires just 1 line of code. What would be the effort required to create something in SWT? hmmm not very different:

public static void addPrompt(final Text text, final String defaultText) {
    text.addFocusListener(new FocusListener() {

        public void focusGained(FocusEvent e) {
            if(text.getText().equals(defaultText)) {
                text.setText("");
                text.setForeground(null);
            }
        }

        public void focusLost(FocusEvent e) {
            if(text.getText().equals("")) {
                text.setText(defaultText);
                text.setForeground(text.getDisplay().getSystemColor(SWT.COLOR_GRAY));
            }
        }
    });
}

To use:

InputPrompter.addPrompt(text, "Click Me!");

The result

The same trick can be applied to Combo boxes as well.