Using the Model-View-Presenter design pattern for a Java Swing application

Question

I'm working on developing a Java application for organising personal music collections that allows the user to search their digital music library with the help of textual lists displayed in a table, choose songs for playback and provide information about them ie something like Rekordbox ( https://rekordbox.com/en/ ).

After conducting some research on how to design and implement such a system, I came across the Model-View-Presenter design pattern and from what I understood it is a pattern that allows flexible , reusable and test driven code to be written.

So to come to my problem:

1. View classes: Assume I want to have a Swing UI that consists of a JFrame which has 3 JPanels inside of it as separate view classes . ie MainFrameView with MenuBarView, TablePanelView, PlayerPanelView which are created inside the frame (which is a view class itself). Those panels have various Swing components inside of them such as JMenuBar, JTable, JButtons, JProgressBar.
2. Model classes: The two models I have are TableModel (used by the TablePanelView to display the user's music library and which stores the path to the directories of his/her songs in a List ) and PlayerModel (used by the PlayerPanelView to manipulate the the digital audio files that the user selects ie play/pause/stop songs, fast forward etc.) The PlayerModel uses the selected by the user song directory to initialize itself.

So, my question is how can I implement the Presenter so that the different views (which use different models) are being able to communicate and share information between each other? Should I have a single Presenter to which the views talk or have a presenter for every view? If it's possible to have a single presenter how can that be achieved? If I have one Presenter for the MenuBarView, TablePanelView and PlayerPanelView and those views are contained in another view (which is the MainFrameView ) should I combine the presenters in some way, and if yes how?

Answer 1

If i were you I would try the MVC (Model View Control) pattern before trying MVP. It´s very similar but I would say it´sa bit easier to understand.

I wouldn´t create a own view for the MenuBar because you probably won´t create it dynamically. Just write a method in your MainFrameView where you initialize it and call that in the constructor of the MainView.

The model is a property of the item you use. Now if you want to create a Panel with a own model but also want to access the model from the MainFrameView you simply write a Getter/Setter for it. It looks like this in the MainFrameView:

public TablePanelView tpv;
public void initTablePanelView(TablePanelModel tpm){
  tpv = new TablePanelView();
  tpv.setModel(tpm);
}

So you can use the public methods getModel() or setModel() that you wrote in the TablePanelView to access the Model.

I hope that helped.