Contents

I did submit my changes, which I think others would find useful, to the originator of JCalendar, Kai Toedter, but even after a few prods he remains silent.

I have an interest in JCalendar because it is the "gDateChooser" component in the Inq client/server scripting language. If you want to know more about that see http://www.inqwell.com.

Accordingly I have combined the things I found with my own features and volunteer to maintain these components. Get in touch if you are interested: tom dot sanders at inqwell dot com or may be a board at forums.inqwell.com.

My changes, outlined below, can be found at https://github.com/inqwell/jcalendar. See also What Is Out There.

Tom's Changes

Components

• The nullText property.
  Sometimes it is nice to display some text in JDateChooser, rather than blank, when the date is null. For example null might mean "Open Ended" or whatever. There is a new property on JDateChooser to specify this.
• The selectOnFocus property.
  When a JDateChooser (that is the underlying JTextComponent) gains the focus, optionally select its text. Useful for keyboard junkies.
• The dateVerifier property.
  As well as min/maxSelectableDate, the DateVerifier interface allows clients to specify arbitrary validation checks, for example valid business days. When present on JDayChooser, JCalendar or JDateChooser the valid() method is called. For JDayChooser and JCalendar (and within JDateChooser obviously) the calendar buttons are disabled for dates that are not valid. If a JDateChooser has a spinner editor then invalid dates are skipped in the direction of travel. The same is true for values entered as text.
• Keyboard interface.
  As far as I am aware, using the mnemonic is limited in that it does not require the component to have the focus. If you have more than one JDateChooser in your window Alt+C will only ever apply to the one most recently created. I have changed this to use the input/action map. When focused in the underlying JTextComponent, Ctrl-C pops up the calendar and Ctrl-N sets the value to null.
• Miscellaneous.
  JDateChooser.lastSelectedDate not used - I removed it. Similarly isInitialized.
  IDateEditor exposes the underlying DateFormat
  IDateEditor provides a method to retrieve the underlying JTextComponent.

Test Program

For JDateChooser I have added a check box that sets the top four choosers to null when checked, today when not. You can set them to null individually using ctrl-n when they have the focus. Set the nullText using the text field.

Apart from the keyboard behaviour everything should be backwards compatible with 1.3.3.

TODO (Possibly)

Secondly, its a question as to what "today" is. It need not be today's date of course. Your system may have its own idea of what the date it is. I'll think a bit more about that.

Last, may be support a separate format for acceptable input, eg a short form like ddMM, again for k/b junkies.

Issues Raised in the Forums

• UI and JDateChooser state become inconsistent when invalid text is entered
  http://www.toedter.com/forum/post.php?cat=1&fid=2&pid=95&page=1
  This is (probably) the same thing as this post. I have not considered this issue.


• Memory Leak
  http://www.toedter.com/forum/post.php?cat=1&fid=3&pid=32&page=1
  Didn't find this myself but obviously very important. The WeakReference fix would be the proposal together with deprecating the cleanup() method.
  
  
• Month Browsing
  http://www.toedter.com/forum/post.php?cat=1&fid=2&pid=102&page=1
  Fixed in luuuis's github - see below.


• Time Zones
  http://www.toedter.com/forum/post.php?cat=1&fid=2&pid=90&page=1
  http://www.toedter.com/forum/post.php?cat=1&fid=3&pid=36&page=1
  Fixed in luuuis's github - see below.


• Performance (relating to construction)
  http://www.toedter.com/forum/post.php?cat=1&fid=3&pid=29&page=1
  http://www.toedter.com/forum/post.php?cat=1&fid=2&pid=96&page=1

  No code supplied. Talk about not creating the member jcalendar unless/until it is required. Have not looked at this myself.

scregg
TathiWitch
nkachr
moradan
slartibartfast
Kris Kemper
stever
mcnalu
jainromil
luuuis
vewert
joetraff
peterk1
Francesca
tuler

JCalendar at Github maintained by forum member luuuis. His fixes as above based on version 1.3.3. This version is also hosted at https://oss.sonatype.org/index.html#nexus-search;quick~jcalendar as jcalendar-tz.

My changes, luuuis' time zone enhancement, month browsing fix and the memory leak fix by Kris Kemper are all at https://github.com/inqwell/jcalendar.

Using the ideas suggested at http://cemerick.com/2010/08/24/hosting-maven-repos-on-github/ you can use this version as follows:

  <repositories>
    .
    .
    <repository>
      <id>inqwell-repo</id>
      <url>https://github.com/inqwell/mvn-repo/raw/master/releases</url>
      <name>Inqwell JCalendar Extensions</name>
    </repository>
    .
    .

  </repositories>
  .
  .
  <dependencies>
    .
    .
    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.inqwell</groupId>
      <artifactId>jcalendar</artifactId>
      <version>1.3.3-inqwell-1.0</version>
    </dependency>
    .
    .
  </dependencies>