Directly Accessing Table Elements

The Table control provides access to an internally created sheet, row, column, and cell object; that is, the JadeTableElement class and its JadeTableCell, JadeTableColumn, JadeTableRow, and JadeTableSheet subclasses. You can use these objects to directly access the properties and methods of the object without using the accessMode property to access the tables (and therefore reducing the amount of Jade logic required to handle tables).

Using instances of these subclasses is equivalent to setting the accessMode property of the Table control, summarized in the following table.

JadeTableElement Subclass	Equivalent to the accessMode value for the Table class…
JadeTableCell	Table.AccessMode_Cell
JadeTableColumn	Table.AccessMode_Column
JadeTableRow	Table.AccessMode_Row
JadeTableSheet	Table.AccessMode_Sheet

For details, see the appropriate class in Chapter 1.

To eliminate the overhead of creating an object for each cell, column, row, and sheet of the table, only one object of each type is created, which is essentially a proxy object that holds the last reference to the cell, column, row, or sheet that was last accessed.

Accessing a cell, column, row, or sheet sets a corresponding property in the Table class that you can then use to subsequently access that table element, as follows.

• accessCell method sets the accessedCell property to the returned cell

• accessColumn method sets accessedColumn property to the returned column

• accessRow method sets accessedRow property to the returned row

• accessSheet method sets accessedSheet property to the returned sheet

The following code fragments show examples of accessing the last table elements that were accessed.

table1.accessCell(2, 3).inputType := Table.InputType_TextBox;
table1.accessedCell.foreColor := Red;

table1.accessSheet(2).accessCell(1, 4).text := "Company";
table1.accessedCell.alignment := Table.Alignment_Right_Middle;

Storing a reference to a returned cell causes problems unless you take a copy of that cell, as shown in the following example in which both cell1 and cell2 refer to the same object, which is referencing cell(3, 4).

cell1 := table1.accessCell(2, 3);
cell2 := table1.accessCell(3, 4);
cell1.text := "abc";

In the following example, cell1 has been cloned and still refers to cell(2, 3).

cell1 := table1.accessCell(2, 3).cloneSelf(true);
// the cloned cell must be deleted by your logic
cell2 := table1.accessCell(3, 4);
cell1.text := "abc";