Beans binding in Matisse forces use of JPA queries/results

[Erik Post]

Hi all,

(I posted this message in nbusers before...)

I have been using the Swing GUI builder for a while now, and I'm a bit surprised at how some of the binding stuff works. Say I have a JTable (e.g. myTable) that displays the results of a list (myList). To my understanding, this would require the following components:

- a JTable myTable, bound to...
- a JPA query result List myList, bound to...
- a JPA Query myQuery, using...
- a JPA EntityManager

If I want to bind a table to a list using the GUI builder, regardless of whether this table has anything to do with JPA at all, I am forced to create a query and possibly an entity manager as well. Then I have to hand-edit their code to fool the GUI
builder into thinking I'm using them, while they are essentially just dummy objects created for the sake of the GUI builder. (Incidentally, there were some bugs in previous NB versions which I think have mostly disappeared now, which made customizing the declaration and initialization near impossible for me. So the GUI builder was mostly getting in the way
of what I wanted to do instead of helping me out.)

Anyway, I think this is a separation of concerns issue; although it might be convenient in some cases to bind to a query result list, this is just one of many possible use cases. It would be good to be able to bind to regular (non-JPA) lists. Suppose I had a JTable bound to a list: