Managed forms are wrappers that add life cycle management and
notification to form members. Managed form is not a form by itself. It has
a form and accepts registration of IFormPart
element. For each
IFormPart
, it manages events like dirty state, saving, commit,
focus, selection changes etc. In order to reach to the wrapped form widget, call
the 'getForm()'
method.
There is a similarity between managed forms and JFace viewers -
the relationship between a form and a managed form is similar to the one between
a Table
widget and TableViewer
in JFace, for example.
Not every control on the form needs to be a form part. It is
better to group a number of controls and implement IFormPart
interface for the group. Section is a natural group and Eclipse Form provides
SectionPart
implementation. It implements the interface and
contains a Section
instance (either created outside and passed into
the constructor, or created in the part itself).