What Are DirtyFX Properties
If you are using JavaFX as a Reactive platform, you’ll have the “State” of your GUI represented by a Presentation Model that’s bound to the properties of your GUI Nodes and shared with your business logic. In that Presentation Model, you’ll have ObservableValue and Properties that hold the current value of the data values held in your screen. In most CRUD-like applications, you’ll have a Button that says, “Save” or “Update” or something like that.
But how do you know if the data on the screen and in the Presentation Model has changed, and that an update is required?
And that’s where the DirtyFX Properties come in. DirtFX properties support the idea of a “baseline” value for a Property, and when the current value of the Property different from the baseline value, then the Property is considered “dirty”. DirtyFX Properties also support the concept of resetting the current value back to the baseline value and, conversely, setting a new baseline value that is the same as the current value.
A Little History
The original implementation of DirtyFX comes from Thomas Nield’s excellent DirtyFX library published in 2018. He’s indicated in his GitHub account that he’s too busy to maintain most of his libraries, so feel free to fork them and support them. So here we are.
The original DirtyFX library was also written in Kotlin, but the style is not very Kotlin-like (IMHO). For most of the classes, he’s simply used composition to build a wrapper around two Simple{Type}Property's (one for the current, and one for the baseline value), and the delegated all the normal Property functions that you might call to the one that holds the current value.
However, when you look at the source code for a class like SimpleStringProperty, you find that it extends the abstract class StringPropertyBase and adds only the functionality to support the two methods not implemented in StringPropertyBase that are declared in abstract classes further up the hierarchy. These methods are getBean(), and getName(). SimpleStringProperty supplies the fields to hold these values, and implements the constructors to populate them. All the other Simple{Type}Properties are the same.
It seemed better to me to replicate this functionality and incorporate it in the DirtyFX Properties directly, and leave the Simple{Type}Properties out the mix entirely. Kotlin supports abstract fields and default methods in interfaces, so most of the mechanics can be handled inside of the DirtyProperty interface.
The result is that each Dirty{Type}Property class is only about 20 lines long, most of that devoted to handling getName() and getBean() and the associated constructors.
I felt that Thomas’ rebaseline() method name was needlessly long, so I’ve used rebase() instead. Otherwise, the usages are the same here as in the original DirtyFX library.
Finally, I’ve never been able to see a need or decide how DirtyCollectionProperties should work. So I’ve left them out of the WidgetsFX implementation of DirtyFX. If you need them, then you should probably use Thomas’ implementation.
Potential Overhead of the DirtyFX Properties
The DirtyFX Properties replace Simple{Type}Properties and their base operation works identically to the Simple{Type}Properties as most of the functionality is handled be {Type}PropertyBase. However, the base value is held in an ObjectProperty<{Type}> field of its own, and the isDirty field is held as a Binding between the current value and the base value.
In most applications, you’ll never see a performance difference, and there would be no problem with just using Dirty{Type}Property instead of Simple{Type}Property everywhere.
The Classes
The following classes are supplied:
- DirtyStringProperty
- DirtyBooleanProperty
- DirtyIntegerProperty
- DirtyDoubleProperty
- DirtyObjectProperty
- DirtyLongProperty
- DirtyCompositeProperty
Except for DirtyCompositeProperty these all work the same as the Simple{Type}Properties but support reset(), rebase() and isDirtyProperty().
CompositeDirtyProperty
CompositeDirtyProperty is an agregator class for DirtyFX Properties.