org.netbeans.spi.editor.highlighting (Editor Library 2) - NetBeans API Javadoc (Current Development Version)

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Package org.netbeans.spi.editor.highlighting

The Highlighting SPI is a new way of influencing how text in an editor component is rendered.

See:
Description

Interface Summary

HighlightsChangeListener The listener of changes in a HighlightsContainer.

HighlightsContainer The container of highlighted areas and their attributes.

HighlightsLayerFactory Factory for producing HighlightsLayers.

HighlightsSequence An iterator through highlights in a HighlightsContainer.

Interface Summary
HighlightsChangeListener	The listener of changes in a `HighlightsContainer`.
HighlightsContainer	The container of highlighted areas and their attributes.
HighlightsLayerFactory	Factory for producing `HighlightsLayer`s.
HighlightsSequence	An iterator through highlights in a `HighlightsContainer`.

Class Summary

HighlightsChangeEvent An event object notifying about a change in highlighting of certain area of a document.

HighlightsLayer The highlight layer defines a set of highlights used for rendering a document.

HighlightsLayerFactory.Context The context passed to a factory when it is asked to create HighlightLayers.

ZOrder This class determines a position of a HighlightsLayer in relation to other layers.

Class Summary
HighlightsChangeEvent	An event object notifying about a change in highlighting of certain area of a document.
HighlightsLayer	The highlight layer defines a set of highlights used for rendering a document.
HighlightsLayerFactory.Context	The context passed to a factory when it is asked to create `HighlightLayer`s.
ZOrder	This class determines a position of a `HighlightsLayer` in relation to other layers.

Package org.netbeans.spi.editor.highlighting Description

The Highlighting SPI is a new way of influencing how text in an editor component is rendered. The editor framework in Netbeans is an extension of the Swing Text SPI framework and as such it uses things like Elements and Views to render a Document on a screen.

Since the editor framework is primarily designed to support various different types of files in the IDE it has to give module a chance to participate in documents rendering. Modules providing support for different languages usually need to influence colors and fonts of different parts of a source file depending on what code it contains (i.e. syntax coloring) or what other information the module needs presenting to a user (e.g. text annotations, hyperlinking, etc.). This all and more can be achieved by using the Highlighting SPI.

Key parts of the SPI

The very basic idea behind the SPI is to render a document as a sandwich of independent layers, which will say what colors and font should be used for rendering particular parts of the document. These parts of the document together with their rendering attributes (i.e. colors or font) are called highlighted areas or highlights. Each layer can provide as many non-overlapping highlights as it likes and each module can provide as many layers as it needs. The implementation behind the SPI will collect all layers registered for a particular document type (i.e. mime type), ask each of them for its highlights, merge those highlights together and finally send them to the draw engine, which will render the document.

The whole SPI is organized around the HighlightsLayer class, which is the ultimate thing that modules need to implement in order to provide a list of highlights for a document. The HighlightsLayers are created by HighlightsLayerFactory, which should be registered in MimeLookup under the mime-type of a document that the layer should be used for. All layers registered for one type of a document are ordedred according to the ZOrder they provide. Besides of ZOrder the layers provide additional information about nature of highlights they maintain.

The HighlightsLayer class implements HighlightsContainer interface, which is the fundamental part of the SPI. The HighlightsContainer interface allows to get a list of highlighs and to listen on changes in highlights that it contains. Besides of HighlightsLayer there are two other implementations of this interface and they are OffsetsBag and PositionsBag. Both OffsetsBag and PositionsBag classes allow adding and removing highlights dynamically. The highlights can be added either one-by-one or in chunks; each change is reported to listeners.

HighlightsLayer registration

The registration of HighlightsLayers has to be done through an instance of the HighlightsLayerFactory class. The factory should be registered in MimeLookup under the mime-type of documents, which the HighlightsLayer should be used for. For example, if a module wants to provide HighlightsLayer for text/x-something documents it should implement its own HighlightsLayerFactory (e.g. org.some.module.HLFactory class) and register it in MimeLookup using its XML layer as it is shown on the example below.

<folder name="Editors">
  <folder name="text">
    <folder name="x-something">
        <file name="org-some-module-HLFactory.instance" />
    </folder>
  </folder>
</folder>

The HLFactory class will simply return a new instance of the module's implementation of the HighlightsLayer class from its createLayers method. The parameter of the createLayers method provides access to a JTextComponent and its Document, which the layer is being created for. The method can create and return multiple HighlightsLayers.

HighlightsLayer lifecycle

The lifecycle of HighlightsLayers is tied to the lifecycle of Document. The infrastructure creates new instances of layers by calling registered HighlightsLayerFactory objects every time it needs to visualize a new Document. The layers created for one Document are not cached or resused in any way. This means that the layers themselvs do not have to take care about a potential change of a Document instance in JTextComponent. The infrastructre will always create a new set of layers if the Document instance changes. Therefore the layers can simply hold their instance of JTextComponent and/or Document and treat them as invariants.

Locking and `Document` changes

The basics of the locking and events model of Swing documents is described in the javadoc of the javax.swing.text.AbstractDocument class. Netbeans documents use the same patterns and so does the Highlighting SPI, because of its tight relation to documents. The fundamentals of the Swing documents locking model are that any changes to a document are done under the document's write lock, the document's listeners are notified synchronously on the mutating thread and have full read access to the document, but can't modify it.

The main functionality of the Highlighting SPI is to maintain highlights of certain areas of a document. These highlights are specified as a triple of starting offset, ending offset and a set of attributes. The offsets are usually passed in and out accross the SPI boundaries in form of ints and even though some implementations (e.g. PositionsBag) use Positions the esential rule is that any calls in and out from the SPI have to be made under the document's read lock. Let's have a look on a few examples demonstrating what this means.

Any calls from the infrastructure to HighlightsLayer.getHighlights() have to be carried on under the read lock of the document, which the HighlightsLayer was created for.
When HighlightsLayer needs to notify its listeneres that some of its highlights have changed all the events have to be fired under the layer's document's read lock. Obviously, the listeners are not allowed to modify the document from the event notification methods.
Any calls to OffsetsBag or PositionsBag that modify their content have to be done under the read lock of the document, which the bag was created for. Both bags makes all the changes synchronously on the caller's thread and this even includes firing notification events. Therefore all events fired from OffsetsBag or PositionsBag will be fired under the document's read lock if the mutating thread holds the read lock.

The Highlighting SPI does not use any special threads and any processing it does is always done on the caller's thread. This means that the above described constraints hardly cause any limitation for practical use. The majority of things happening around a document are done from within DocumentListeners, which hold the document's read lock anyway.

The Highlighting SPI is generally thread-safe meaning that any implementation behind the SPI can be used simultaneously from multiple threads if not stated otherwise. This doesn't change in any way the rule of acquiring a read lock before calling the SPI. Swing documents generally allow access for multiple readers that can run concurrently.

Z-order

Since there can be multiple layers suplying highlights for one document and the highlights can generally overlap it is important to sort the layers according to their Z-order. For this purpose each layer has to supply an appropriate ZOrder.

ZOrder maintains a position of a layer relatively to other layers as a simple integer number. The higher the number the higher (more visible) the layer is in the z-order hierarchy. Instances of the ZOrder class are immutable making it impossible to dynamically change a position of a layer in the z-order stack created for a document.

The ZOrder class contains several predefined constants, which can be used as well-known positions. These constants are called z-order racks and are meant to be used as a starting point for positioning a layer. An exact z-order can then be specified by choosing an integer position of the layer within a rack. The racks are listed below in their respective z-order.

TOP_RACK - the top most rack
SHOW_OFF_RACK - layers providing short-lived highlights that can temporarily override highlights from other layers. An example can be text selection or text search layers.
DEFAULT_RACK - the rack for general layers
CARET_RACK - layers that highlight a caret
SYNTAX_RACK - layers providing syntax or semantic highlighting of text
BOTOM_RACK - the bottom rack

Using `AttributeSet`

The Highlighting SPI uses javax.swing.text.AttributeSet to define attributes for particular highlights. These attributes can be anything, which the editor's drawing engine understands and can render. Usually the attribute names are constants from javax.swing.StyleConstants or org.netbeans.api.editor.settings.EditorStyleConstants. The values depend on the meaning of each particular attribute, but they usually are instances of java.awt.Color, java.lang.Integer, Boolean.TRUE or Boolean.FALSE and similar.

Since there can be more highlighting layers participating on one document and they can provide highlights that overlap the infrastructure will merge attributes from all AttributeSets provided for areas with overlapping highlights. The merging is done in the order defined by ZOrders of the participating layers, which means that if two layers provide an attribute with the same name then the merged AttributeSet will contain the attribute from the layer, which is placed higher in the z-order hierarchy.

There are two important rules for using AttributeSets, which should be carefully followed by all highlighting layer implementations. Violating these rules may potentialy break the rendering of a document or may cause performance problems.

Immutability - All instances of AttributeSets should always be treated as immutable objects. Once you create an AttibuteSet and use it for a highlight you should not modify it. Your modification is most likely to be ignored or can have unpredictable results.
One instance only - There can be thousands of highlights supplied by layers for one document and a lot of them will be the same (e.g. all keywords in a java document are highlighted with the same color and font). It would be unreasonable to create a new AttributeSet for each of those highlights when all of them would in fact be the same. Instead you should always create one instance of AttributeSet and share it among all highlights that render the same text category (e.g. token or token category, etc.).

The AttributeSets used for highlighting are often created by calling FontColorSettings and it is a responsibility of this class to prevent excesive creation of AttributeSets it provides. However, if your highlighting layer creates its own AttributeSets they should always be cached and reused. You can use methods from the AttributesUtilities class for creating immutable AttributeSets.

Use cases

Use case 1. - Caret selection

The Netbeans editor as any other modern editor allows selecting blocks of text and highlighting them to a user for easier identification. We call this functionality caret selection services and it includes things as simple as marking a block of text that the user selected for copy/paste operation or highlighting a line where the caret is placed to more complex ones such as highlighting occurences of a text that the user search for using the 'Find dialog', etc.

This functionality usually only needs to create one highlight and update it depending on the caret movements/selection notified from JTextComponent. The more complex cases may need to create several highlights (e.g. to show the text being searched for). Generally, the highlights are created independently on the text changes in the document itself (e.g. the caret move or searching for a text). However, they have to survive editing the document (e.g. the highlighted occurences of the searched text have to remain highlighted when other parts of the document are edited).

The caret selection highlights are generally short-lived and have higher importance than other highlights (e.g. syntax or semantic coloring). They usually change the background color to highlight the selection, but also retain as much of a visual appearance of the highlighted text as possible.

Use case 2. - Syntax highlighting

This type of a document coloring shows 'words' or characters in different colors to indicate their meaning in the structure of the text document. This is very popular with highly structured documents such as source code files, scripts, SGML-like documents, etc. It's usually not used for plain text documents containing text in a human language.

Syntax highlighting in Netbeans editor is based on a lexical analysis done by lexer plug-ins registered for various types of documents. The lexers are written using the APIs provided by the Lexer module. During the lexical analysis text gets split into tokens of different types and categories. Each token type or category can have defined its own coloring information such as font and foreground and background colors, etc. Tokens know their position in text (i.e. offset and length), which information can then be used for creating highlights.

Decoupling the lexers and making them pluggable lets the syntax highlighting be very flexible. A single layer based on the Lexer API can colorify all sorts of documents providing that there is a lexer registered for each type of a document.

Generally a syntax analysis is very fast and syntax highlighting immediately reflects changes done in text. The syntax highlighting layer is usually at the bottom of the hierarchy of highlighting layers.

Use case 3. - Semantic highlighting

In fact semantic coloring regardless of the language it is provided for is very similar to syntax coloring. Words or groups of characters are highlighted depending on their meaning in the text. The difference is in the amount of information that is needed to make this type of coloring meaningful. While with syntax coloring all the information needed is in the text itself in semantic coloring parts of text can be colored depending on information found in a completely different document (e.g. in another source file, library, project, etc.).

Semantic highlighting is highly dependent on the type of a document and therefore is usually provided on case-by-case basis and only for the most important types of documents (i.e. those most frequenty used such as java files in Netbeans). Also, semantic coloring is generally not very fast, because of the amount of information that is sometimes needed to gather before a document can be colored. Therefore, while all the effort is made to make semantic coloring reflect text changes as soon as possible, it is generally done asynchronously outside of the documents event model and highlights are created as soon as they are available. The tokens created during the semantic analysis always contain token's position within the text in some form (i.e. either offset or Position). If Positions are available they should be accepted and re-used by the Highlighting SPI.

Use case 4. - Embedded languages

An embedded language is a language of a part of a document that is different than the main language of the document. An example can be a java scriplet in a JSP page or JavaScript in an HTML document. The main language of a JSP page is 'text/x-jsp' and the emebedded language in the case of a java scriplet is 'text/x-java'. For the HTML document the main language is 'text/html' and if a JavaScript part is included in the document the 'text/x-javascript' is the embedded language.

The language embedding is supported by Lexer API and therefore there is no problem with supporting it for syntax coloring. For semantic coloring all the work lies on the highlighting layers providing semantic coloring support for a particular language. These layers have to be prepared to provide highlights for parts of a document, which does not contain text in the language they support, but which contains some embedded parts in that language. The Highlighting infrastructure will scan the document for all languages it contains and then it will create appropriate highlighting layers. The layers can be added dynamically as user inserts parts of text in a new language. The layers, however, may not be removed immediately when the last part of text in a language they suppor is removed. Therefore the layers should be prepared to provide no highlights if there is no text they recognize.

Use case 5. - Filtering layers used for JTextComponent

In certain situations JTextComponent or JEditorPane are used for other purposes than editing. For example debugger may want to show JEditorPane for adding a new watch, where a user could write a piece of java code that should evaluated. This pane should use basically the same layers so that the entered code looks like properly colored and formatted java code. However, it is not desirable to use exactly the same layers as for an ordinary java editor, because some highlightings have a little value in this context or could even be disturbing. There is no point in highlighting the row with the caret, because watches are essentially one-line expressions. There is also a little point in showing text-search related highlights, because hardly anybody will use text search in these simple expressions anyway. On the other hand it makes sense to highlight selected text if user selects some.

There can be a whole range of usecases where modules need to show an editor pane, but do not want to use a particular set of highlighting layers, which are registered for the mime type of text that the module is trying to display and which would normally be used for an ordinary editor pane. These usecases are very specific for each module and its way of implementing some features.

The editor insfrastructure supports this usecase through allowing modules to set special properties on the editor pane that they want to use for displaying text. The properties are called HighlightsLayerIncludes and HighlightsLayerExcludes. The value of those properties can be String or String [] of regular expressions that will be used for finding the matching layers by evaluating each regular expression against the layer's type id. The exact interpretation of those two properties is described below.

HighlightsLayerIncludes - Defines the set of layers that will be used for rendering text in an editor pane that defines this property. Every layer, which type Id matches at least one of the regular expressions defined by this property, will be included for rendering. The default value is null, which means that all registered layers will be used.
HighlightsLayerExcludes - Defines the set of layers that will not be used for rendering. Every layer, which type Id matches at least one of the regular expressions defined by this property, will be excluded from rendering. The default value is null, which means that no layer will be excluded.

The filters defined by those two properties are used in the same order as they were listed above. That is the includes are used first and whatever layers they includ are then filtered by the excludes filter. The result is then used for rendering text in an editor component, which defined those properties.

The example below shows how to disable the caret row highlighting layer on JEditorPane.

  JEditorPane pane = new JEditorPane();
  pane.putClientProperty(
    "HighlightsLayerExcludes", 
    "^org\\.netbeans\\.modules\\.editor\\.lib2\\.highlighting\\.CaretRowHighlighting$"
  );

Other usecases

The main usecases described above are certainly not the only usecases of the Highlighting SPI. In general the SPI can be used for binding any type of information to parts of text in a document. While this information should have limited size to keep a good performance of Netbeans editor it can be pretty much anything. Information provided in highlights is currently used only by the editor's drawing engine, which provides a limited set of features useful mostly for rendering text. Some other uses could be for example text annotations, hyperlinking, showing icons in text, etc.