ClickableTextRenderer Add-on for Vaadin 7

This is a Renderer for Grid in Vaadin 7.

It allows text in a cell to be rendered as a clickable link. The typical use-case is for drill-down within the Grid.

Usage

The renderer inherits from ClickableRenderer so the use is the same.

Nevertheless, here's a taste:

Suppose your Grid has a column named "city". Then the renderer may be used like this:

// Define what to do when clicked
ClickableRenderer.RendererClickListener myListener
        = (ClickableRenderer.RendererClickEvent event) -> {
            // Do something here. Use event.getItemId() to figure out
            // which row was clicked.
        };

// Add the renderer to some column
grid.getColumn("city").setRenderer(new ClickableTextRenderer(myListener));

For a complete demo see the demo project (under /demo in this project).

It's not really a link

What the user sees walks and talks like a link, but it is not a link in the normal HTML way, i.e. <a href="...">text</a>. This means the user cannot hoover over the link and see where it will take him. You can, however, create a tooltip for the link.

The text is styled with v-link and this it why it will display as if it was a real link.

Advanced use

ClickableTextRenderer renders String input and doesn't allow HTML. It is simple to use.

However, ClickableTextRendererAdv is more advanced (hence the name) and can be used when HTML text rendering is required or when there's a need to set the link's tooltip (or 'description' as is the Vaadin terminology). Use of ClickableTextRendererAdv will always require a Converter because it renders objects of type ClickableText, so this needs to be column's Presentation type. It may seem cumbersome to have to convert to this Presentation type but the advantage is that both the link text and the tooltip can depend on the value of the cell.

The demo project contains an example of usage of ClickableTextRendererAdv.

What's the alternative ?

You can add an ItemClickListener to your Grid. This allows you to catch when a row is clicked. This may be a simpler solution for you if you want to enable some drill-down from your Grid. However beware of the following when using this method:

There's no styling so is it obvious for your user that the row can be clicked ?
What if you want different links in different columns? Of course from within your ItemClickListener you can figure out which column was clicked but it all becomes somewhat muddy from a UX perspective.
If your Grid has editing enabled then by default double-clicking a row opens the editor. So single-clicking will take you somewhere else while double-clicking will enter edit mode. This is not a very logical for an end-user, IMHO.

Bug reports, contributions, etc