By Thomas Tempelmann, tempelmann@gmail.com
Version 5 (20 Mar 2019)
The latest version can now always be found here: https://github.com/tempelmann/XojoListboxTV
(Previously, there were at http://files.tempel.org/RB/Listbox%20TableView)
These projects, which all work both with Real Studio 2012r2.1 and later Xojo versions, are for Mac OS X only. They all make use of the Cocoa-based NSTableView and NSOutlineView controls for flat and hierarchical listboxes.
While Xojo's own ListBox is a custom-written control, NSTableView and NSOutlineView are truly native to macOS, and therefore not only look better on a Mac system but also offer improved behavior, including smoother scrolling (by pixel, not by line), animation, column re-ordering, smarter sorting, and much more.
See this Xojo blog article for a way to do something similar with Xojo's ListBox control:
The MBS plugins needed for these demos are:
Cocoa Plugin
CocoaBase Plugin
CocoaControls Plugin
MacOSX Plugin
Main PluginThe OutlineControl.rbp is a very simple demo to show how to build a hierarchical list using NSOutlineView (which is a subclass of NSTableView).
The Disk Browser.rbp is a more complete demo for a hierarchical list, showing the use of contextual menus, editing, drag & drop and updating folder contents.
The "ListBoxTV TableView.rbp" project contains a near-complete replacement for Xojo's ListBox control, along with many test cases for its various abilities. When you run it, you'll see the TableView-based listbox at the top, and Xojo's Listbox below it. Both use mostly the same code to set them up, so that you can easily compare their looks and behavior. To use it in your own projects, copy the "ListBox_NSTableView" folder and paste it into your project, then open your Windows there, and change the Super of the ListBox controls to "ListBoxTV" (TV stands for TableView). That will switch them to using the native NSTableView. Then see if your project still compiles and runs. Some things are not fully working yet - see the Notes section in ListBoxTV about that.
"ListBoxTV OutlineView.rbp" is an extended version of the flat ListboxTV with the ability to support hierarchical Listboxes. If you only need non-hierarchical lists in your project, use the TableView based code as it's a bit less complex and might also perform a bit faster.
This is a simple demo to show how to make an on-demand listbox based on the flat ListBoxTV control.
This is a more complex version of the flat ListBoxTV that shows how to browse an Sqlite database without having to pre-fill all rows in advance but only fetch the rows that are currently to be displayed in the listbox. This will significantly increase the performance of browsing DB tables with thousands of rows.
This demonstrates how to use arbitrary Views for every Cell, by using ContainerControls that can virtually contain anything (Labels, Buttons, Chexkboxes, PopupMenus). The key to this is found in the ListboxDemoWin.cocoaListbox.view event handler. You can apply the same technique with the hierarchical (OutlineView) ListboxTV version as well.