An interactor is a Java™ class that manages the behavior of an object in response to an event. Rogue Wave® JViews Diagrammer supplies various predefined interactors.

There are two types of interactor: view and object. You can control the default interactor settings through the style sheet.

View interactors affect the display in general. The view interactors of JViews Framework are available in Rogue Wave JViews Diagrammer to manage the zoom and pan facilities, and the selection and creation of general nodes and general links. These interactors are in the ilog.views.interactor package.

There are two object creation interactors for SDM objects:

These interactors create an object as a copy of a supplied “model” object. For JViews Diagrammer applications, you can use the palette bar class ( IlvDiagrammerPaletteBar ) to set up a palette of model objects from which to create objects in a diagram.

There is also another interactor for new SDM objects:

An object interactor is local to the graphic object. That means it is possible to specify this type of interactor in the style sheet. There is a renderer called Interactor which fetches the Interactor graphic property from the style sheet to attach an object interactor to the graphic object. The value of this graphic property is the name of a class that subclasses IlvObjectInteractor. The object interactor is then free to do whatever it wants, starting from the graphic object. For example, the InfoBalloon renderer subclasses the Interactor renderer to display an enhanced tooltip.

You can enable the Interactor renderer in the style sheet. You can also define a default object interactor for all nodes and links, see the following code example: