JavaFX Fundamentals - Java 8 Recipes - page 576

How It Works
Just for fun we created a simple GUI to display employees and their bosses. You notice
in Figure 14-13 on the left is a list of people (the bosses). When users select a boss,
their employees will be shown to in the TableView area to the right. You'll also no-
tice the tooltip when you hover over the selected boss.
Before considering the TableView control, it's important that you understand the
ListView that is responsible for updating the TableView . In model-view fashion,
an ObservableList is created that contains all the bosses for the ListView con-
trol's constructor. This code calls the bosses leaders . The following code creates a
ListView control:
// List of leaders
ObservableList<Person> leaders = getPeople();
final ListView<Person> leaderListView = new
ListView<Person>(leaders);
Next, create a cell factory to properly display the person's name in the ListView
control. Because each item is a Person object, the ListView does not know how to
render each row in the ListView control. You simply create a
javafx.util.Callback generic type object by specifying the ListView<Per-
son> and a ListCell<Person> data types. If you're using a trusty IDE such as
NetBeans, it will pregenerate things such as the implementing method call() . Next
is the variable cell of type ListCell<Person> (within the call() method), in
which you create a lambda expression. The lambda expression contains an implement-
ation for an updateItem() method. To implement the updateItem() method,
obtain the person information and update the Label control ( leadLbl ). Lastly, you
set the tooltip to the associated text.
You then create a TableView control to display the employee base on the selec-
ted boss from the ListView . When creating a TableView , first create the column
headers. Use the following code to create a table column:
TableColumn<String> firstNameCol = new
TableColumn<String>("First Name");
firstNameCol.setProperty("firstName");