How to scale images in an SWT TableItem?

Question

I have been struggling to get the images displayed in an SWT TableItem to scale. I have a listener which scales the fonts correctly, and I have confirmed that the images being set into the TableItem are correctly scaled. I know that the scaled images are being successfully set into the TableItem, because I can even change what image gets displayed. But the new image is always displayed at the original scale.

I have read in SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Volume 1 where the authors state:

The First Image Defines the Size of All Images in the Control

Due to a Windows limitation, just like ToolBar, TabFolder, and Tree, Table scales the images it displays to be the size of the first image inserted into the control.

The behaviour I'm seeing is the most extreme case suggested by this quote -- images in the table seem to be being scaled, not the the size of the first image in the table, but to the size of the first image ever to have been in the table . Can anyone confirm or refute this? Does anyone have any more detailed information about the behaviour of images in TableItems? Is this restriction really the show-stopper it seems to be?

And in particular, if I go down the path of custom drawing table items ( Custom Drawing Table and Tree Items ), am I likely to bump into any further showstoppers?

(You'll note what a good job I'm doing of gritting my teeth and not giving way to rage at having to deal with Windows stupidity even when using a supposedly cross-platform development environment!)

Answer 1

I can confirm this in my experience on Windows.

I propose one of two solutions:

• Use custom table drawing as per the link you mentioned. It's a little annoying but not more than 2 hours of work I'd say to learn and implement it.
• Use an alternative SWT table control eg Nebula Grid or KTable which do not share the same platform limitations of Table on Windows

Edit: in response to "And in particular, if I go down the path of custom drawing table items (Custom Drawing Table and Tree Items), am I likely to bump into any further showstoppers?"

The only issue I found with custom drawing is that it's best to know ahead of time what the maximum row height will be, otherwise there will be jumping when Table has to increase the row height and therefore scroll items a bit while it readjusts