Hidden Creator Feature: Hierarchy Display

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

There's a hidden feature in Creator's page designer which lets you view the
current selection "context"; it shows the series of parents for the
currently selected component, and you can click on any of these to
choose the parent. This is useful when you're in the middle of a
nested component tree, such as within a data table for example.

The screenshot should get across the point. Various other page design
tools offer a similar feature.

This is currently implemented by drawing a gray, semi transparent box
on top of the bottom of the page (such that the underlying page can be
seen through it), then writing out the component hierarchy, with the
current selection in bold. Once the selection is cleared the hiearchy
display is removed.

To check it out, run Creator with this flag:

-J-Ddesigner.paintSelHierarchy=1

Of course, this feature is not supported and may even reboot your
computer and cancel your life insurance policy. Perhaps I wasn't even
supposed to let you know about it, so let's keep this between the two of
us, okay?

This feature will become an official part of Creator one day, but people
didn't like it cluttering the design area so it will probably show up
in the tab area background instead.