Tables in gvSIG are of two types: those showing the alphanumeric data associated to a layer in a View and those that are added to the project as standalone tables with supported formats or coming from any database with supported connexion by gvSIG (ODBC, memory process, etc).

The table of the layer is related to that layer and it has a series of properties and associated event listeners to allow behaviours such as that selecting on the layer is reflected on the table and vice versa. They have been added to the project by the “Show attributes of selected layer” button that is in the View and that becomes enabled when there is an active layer.

The class representing the document Table is ProjectTable. It is basically a bundle around an object IEditableSource that is where the real data is taken from (values of rows). The rest of the properties are used to manage the layers associated to that table, the visible fields, the aliases of those fields, etc.

Usually we will work with the model IEditableSource that is under, if we want to work with the raw data.

If we need to add functionalities to the table window, than we will have to look at the com.iver.cit.gvsig.project.documents.table.gui.Table class. This class is the one implementing the visible part of the Table document. It is very complex and probably subject to change in the gvSIG version 2.0, thus we are not going to go too deep, just a little over it.

• It has a series of associated listeners to answer to the mouse and keyboard events (TableKeyListener, MouseRow, MouseHandler).
• It also answer to the selection events (TableSelectionListener).
• There are methods for editing (columns, rows, cells) that are very related to the internal model of the table (accessible through getModel().getModelo() => getModel() it returns the associated Project Table and ProjectTable.getModelo() returns the IeditableSource interface).

Up to the date the classes implementing IEditableSource are EditableAdapter and VectorialEditableAdapter, which keep the changes in memory until the end of the editing session and all data is saved. This system presents some inconveniency and because of that, it is likely to be changed in version 2.0, so we will not go into much detail about it.