New to Vaadin, How should I approach it

General
1

Hi,

I am new to Vaadin and server side programming. I have been working on a Vaadin app started from scratch for the last couple of weeks and it has been easier then expected. But every now and then I am stumped on how to do some stuff. The API docs wouldn’t help that much because sometimes its just too wordy or there are other pre-requisite concepts also on which a particular concept relies on and hence without having the knowledge and understanding of all the pre-reqs that particular concept could not be understood.
To enforce my point I will give two example from today
1 : I am working on a Table view and depending on some new entry in the table I want to recalculate some previous entry and repaint it. Now, the table API has a few paint/refresh related methods such as refreshRenderedCells, refreshRowCells etc. and the description to those doesn’t make much sense to me and even using them by trial and error do not produce any result. So, as more experiences Vaadin Programmers how do you deal with this ?
2 : I had created a BeanItemContainer with NativeSelect and when to retreive the selected values from the select. I was completely lost by the overwhelming number of methods provided by BeanItemContainer API. In the end it was pretty simple but how could I not over complicate the process of finding the solution.
I understand that to master any language/tool etc one should spend alot of time with it and it comes gradually but it something could make this process easy and more fun that it would be great

2

Great feedback!

Regarding “repainting” Table, Table actually listens to the container that is attached to it. So to update the table, it should be enough to only update the container items behind it and not call anything on the Table object itself.

When you have a BeanItemContainer. the BeanItems won’t notice if the bean changes so you have to update the BeanItem manually. Alternatively, instead of updating the bean, you can update the BeanItem and have the changes flow from there to both the bean and the Table.