Default Properties

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.

Here's another feature in patch 3: the application outline shows the
most important property in a component. For example, if you have
four buttons in the outline, how do you know which one is which?
Most likely the buttons will have different labels, and as you can see
from the screenshot, the button labels now appear next to the instance
names.

This relies on the

default property
of a component. As you can see, the default property for a button is its label (value)
property. For images, it's the (base) filename of the image. For
a hyperlink, it's the url, and for a text component it's the actual
text shown.

Note that you can quickly edit these properties. Click on a component,
such as a button. Now just start typing. Keyboard focus will transfer
to the property sheet, scroll to the default property, and you have
started editing it.

For html tags there's no instance name (since the html markup
does not appear in the page beans), but if tag has an id or
name
attribute, those are shown next to the tag name.