---
title: Creating A Simple Component Container
order: 70
layout: page
---

[[creating-a-simple-component-container]]
= Creating a simple component container

Components in Vaadin can be roughly split into two groups, `Component`{empty}s
and `ComponentContainer`{empty}s. ComponentContainers are Components in
themselves which can also contain other components. If you are about to
implement a component that contains other components, then you'll get a
headstart by extending Vaadin's `ComponentContainer`. The biggest feature
is in transferring the list of server side components from your component
to the client. Here's how you do it.

[[server-side]]
Server Side
^^^^^^^^^^^

To start of we implement our server side component. For this we extend
the ready made abstract implementation `AbstractComponentContainer`. This
requires us to implement `addComponent(Component)`,
`removeComponent(Component)`, `replaceComponent(Component, Component)`,
`getComponentCount` and `getComponentIterator()`.

[source,java]
....
package com.example.widgetcontainer;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.List;

import com.vaadin.ui.AbstractComponentContainer;
import com.vaadin.ui.Component;

public class WidgetContainer extends AbstractComponentContainer {

  List<Component> children = new ArrayList<Component>();

  @Override
  public void addComponent(Component c) {
    children.add(c);
    super.addComponent(c);
    markAsDirty();
  }

  @Override
  public void removeComponent(Component c) {
    children.remove(c);
    super.removeComponent(c);
    markAsDirty();
  }

  public void replaceComponent(Component oldComponent, Component newComponent) {
    int index = children.indexOf(oldComponent);
    if (index != -1) {
      children.remove(index);
      children.add(index, newComponent);
      fireComponentDetachEvent(oldComponent);
      fireComponentAttachEvent(newComponent);
      markAsDirty();
    }
  }

  public int getComponentCount() {
    return children.size();
  }

  public Iterator<Component> iterator() {
    return children.iterator();
  }
}
....

Add, remove and replace are quite straight forward. In the class we
upkeep a list of children internally, and these three methods modify
them. Add and remove have ready made methods in the super class for
notifying all event handlers that the children have changed and because
of that we should make calls to the super methods after we have updated
the list. In `replaceComponent` we have to call
`fireComponentDetachEvent(Component)` and
`fireComponentAttachEvent(Component)` to manually trigger these events. In
all three methods we should also call `markAsDirty` as a last step to
notify the client side that the children have changed.

The methods `getComponentCount()` and `iterator()` takes care of providing
the required information that we need to the client side. Here they are
simple delegate methods to the List's `size()` and `iterator()`.

[[client-side]]
Client Side
^^^^^^^^^^^

Next up, we want to set up a standard GWT widget which will be our
component container's client side widget. GWT in itself has a bunch of
component containers in it. In GWT, these are called Panels. For this
case I will start with a `VerticalPanel`. It is roughly the same as
`VerticalLayout` in Vaadin. Down the road you want to edit this file to
add features or even extend Widget to create a complete custom widget.
For now extending `VerticalPanel` is enough and we'll use that as-is.

[source,java]
....
package com.example.widgetcontainer.client.ui;

import com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.VerticalPanel;

public class VWidgetContainer extends VerticalPanel {
  public static final String CLASSNAME = "v-widgetcontainer";

  public VWidgetContainer() {
    setStyleName(CLASSNAME);
  }
}
....

[[connector]]
Connector
^^^^^^^^^

Your widget's Connector will transfer the components from the server
side as child widgets to our widget. The connector will feed the
children to the panel trough it's standard API, namely `add(Widget)`,
`remove(Widget)` and `clear();`

Instead of going the standard route of extending
`AbstractComponentConnector` as your connector, here we can take use of
Vaadin's internal features and extend
`AbstractComponentContainerConnector`. Additionally to implementing the
`getWidget()` -method from `AbstractComponentConnector`, we also have to
supply the class with an implementation to a method called
`updateCaption(ComponentConnector)`. This method is there if we want the
container to take care of the captions for all the components. We don't
need to take care of these captions in this example so we can leave the
implementation empty.

The real benefit of extending `AbstractComponentContainerConnector` is
that we can now extend a method called
`onConnectorHierarchyChange(ConnectorHierarchyChangeEvent)`. This method
will be called every time that the server side calls `markAsDirty()` if
the component hierarchy has been changed. From within it, we can call on
`getChildComponents` to get a list of all the child components, and
populate our widget with those.

[source,java]
....
package com.example.widgetcontainer.client.ui;

import java.util.List;

import com.google.gwt.core.client.GWT;
import com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.Widget;
import com.example.widgetcontainer.WidgetContainer;
import com.vaadin.client.ComponentConnector;
import com.vaadin.client.ConnectorHierarchyChangeEvent;
import com.vaadin.client.ui.AbstractComponentContainerConnector;
import com.vaadin.client.ui.Connect;

@Connect(WidgetContainer.class)
public class WidgetContainerConnector extends
        AbstractComponentContainerConnector {

  @Override
  public void onConnectorHierarchyChange(ConnectorHierarchyChangeEvent event) {
    List<ComponentConnector> children = getChildComponents();
    VWidgetContainer widget = getWidget();
    widget.clear();
    for (ComponentConnector connector : children) {
      widget.add(connector.getWidget());
    }
  }

  @Override
  public VWidgetContainer getWidget() {
    return (VWidgetContainer) super.getWidget();
  }

  public void updateCaption(ComponentConnector connector) {
  }
}
....

This implementation removes all the component's in the widget and adds
all that are returned from `getChildComponents`. An obvious optimization
to these is to compare what is already in the widget and only
add/remove/move those widgets that have changed.

[[example-usage]]
Example Usage
^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Nothing left but to use the component! Compile the widgetset and check
that the widgetset is in use in your web.xml. Here is a little
stand-alone application that uses this component:

[source,java]
....
package com.example.widgetcontainer;

import java.util.Random;

import com.vaadin.terminal.WrappedRequest;
import com.vaadin.ui.Button;
import com.vaadin.ui.Button.ClickEvent;
import com.vaadin.ui.Button.ClickListener;
import com.vaadin.ui.CheckBox;
import com.vaadin.ui.Component;
import com.vaadin.ui.Label;
import com.vaadin.ui.UI;

public class WidgetcontainerUI extends UI {
  @Override
  public void init(VaadinRequest request) {
    VerticalLayout layout = new VerticalLayout();
    layout.setMargin(true);
    setContent(layout);

    Label label = new Label("Hello Vaadin user");
    layout.addComponent(label);
    final WidgetContainer widgetContainer = new WidgetContainer();
    layout.addComponent(widgetContainer);
    widgetContainer.addComponent(new Label(
        "Click the button to add components to the WidgetContainer."));
    Button button = new Button("Add more components", new ClickListener() {
      @Override
      public void buttonClick(ClickEvent event) {
        Random randomGenerator = new Random();
        int random = randomGenerator.nextInt(3);
        Component component;
        if (random % 3 == 0) {
          component = new Label("A new label");
        } else if (random % 3 == 1) {
          component = new Button("A button!");
        } else {
          component = new CheckBox("A textfield");
        }
        widgetContainer.addComponent(component);
      }
    });
    layout.addComponent(button);
  }
}
....