For my graduation project i needed a component that could display a list of Entity Beans. I found that JTable is such a component and with the help of custom TableCellRenderer and TableCellEditor components i was able to customize the rendering to my needs. In order to get the data into the JTable i implemented a custom TableModel, namely EntityTableModel. Now i can easily generate a JTable that displays Entity Beans:

// fetch the elements we want to display
Object[] elements = employeeController
  .getEntityManager()
  .createNamedQuery("findEmployees")
  .getResultList()
  .toArray();

// build map with column name, entity attribute pairs
HashMap<string, String> colAttrs = new LinkedHashMap<string, String>();
colAttrs.put("First Name", "firstName");
colAttrs.put("Last Name", "lastName");

// build collection with editable attributes
Collection<string> editables = new ArrayList<string>();

// initialise the tablemodel
TableModel tableModel = new EntityTableModel(elements, colAttrs, editables);

// initialise the table
JTable table = new JTable(tableModel);

Here are a couple of screenshots of my graduation project i’ve been working on last couple of weeks. The GUI is built with Swing, the bussiness rules make extensive use of the Apache BeanUtils and Hibernate Validators packages and with PostgreSQL we have a solid database. Since it takes a while to load the EntityManagerFactory we’ve added a simple splashscreen:

The base screen displays a map with the tables in the restaurant. The color of the tables depends on the state of the visit (eg: just arrived, ordered some items, eating soup, eating dessert, paid the bill). There is also the possiblity to group tables. Offcourse you have the possibility to rearrange the tables and add/remove the maps:

As soon as the waiter has choosen a visit he can add orders via an easy to use screen. He also has the possibility to add (pre-configured and/or custom) remarks to a given order. Each order is printed on the printer of the division that is responsible for the handling for the given type of menuitems:

And least but not least, there is a screen that allows the waiter to generate, print and save one or more bills for each visit. If all ordered items have been paid, the visit goes into the PAID state:

Offcourse we’ve also written list/detail panels for all the tables this restaurant uses. Here are screenshots of the list and detail panel for the menuitems: