Wrapping HTML text in a JEditorPane inside a JScrollPane

Question

In an application, I'm using uneditable JEditorPanes as a sort of a generic UI widget that can display somewhat complex content (HTML will do the trick), wrap text lines and catch mouse clicks. Not sure if JEditorPane is a good choice for this, so feel free to suggest alternatives.

The following sample code works fairly well:

import java.awt.GridBagConstraints;
import java.awt.GridBagLayout;

import javax.swing.JEditorPane;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.JScrollPane;
import javax.swing.ScrollPaneConstants;

public class Main {

  private static JPanel createPanel() {
    JPanel panel = new JPanel();
    panel.setLayout(new GridBagLayout());

    for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
      JEditorPane editorPane = new JEditorPane();
      editorPane.setEditable(false);
      editorPane.setContentType("text/html");

      String text =
        "This is <b>item #" + i + "</b>." +
        " It's got text on it that should be wrapped."
      ;

      editorPane.setText(text);

      GridBagConstraints constraints = new GridBagConstraints();
      constraints.gridx = 0;
      constraints.gridy = i;
      constraints.fill = GridBagConstraints.HORIZONTAL;
      constraints.weightx = 1.0;
      constraints.insets.bottom = 5;

      panel.add(editorPane, constraints);
    }

    return panel;
  }


  public static void main(String[] args) {
    JPanel panel = createPanel();

    JFrame frame = new JFrame();
    frame.setSize(200, 200);
    frame.setLocation(200, 200);

    // Change this to switch between examples
    boolean useScrollPane = false;

    if (useScrollPane) {
      JScrollPane scrollPane = new JScrollPane();
      scrollPane.setHorizontalScrollBarPolicy(ScrollPaneConstants.HORIZONTAL_SCROLLBAR_NEVER);
      scrollPane.setViewportView(panel);
      frame.add(scrollPane);
    }
    else {
      frame.add(panel);
    }

    frame.setVisible(true);
  }

}

and produces the following:

However, I may have a large number of these and could use a vertical scrollbar.

So I put the whole thing in a JScrollPane (change the useScrollPane variable to true in the sample code to see this version).

This gives me a vertical scrollbar if I shrink the window height, but the problem is that now the text is no longer wrapped:

So the question is: how can I get both the text wrapping and the vertical scrollbar?

As you can see, I disabled the horizontal scrollbar, but it didn't help much.

PS. I don't have much experience with Swing, so if you see some beginner WTFs in this code, please point them out :)

Answer 1

// JPanel panel = new JPanel();
ScrollablePanel panel = new ScrollablePanel();
panel.setScrollableWidth( ScrollablePanel.ScrollableSizeHint.FIT );

See Scrollable Panel for the class and an explanation on how the class works.

Answer 2

The scrollbars of a JScrollPane appear if the size of the viewport become smaller than the preferred size of its view component. Set the preferred size of the panel in the scroll pane, or set the preferred size of each of the editor panes : the preferred size of the panel will be the composition of the preferred sizes of the editor panes (sum of the preferred height, and max of the preferred widths)