Creation of Swing User Interface : Tables (JTable)

8. Filter content

In addition to sort the table, the RowSorter class enable also to filter the content of the table. We can use for that the setRowFilter method who takes a RowFilter in parameter. RowFilter has several static methods to easily create filters. So we have methods to make “and” or “or” operations on filters. Moreover we’ve also a very useful method to create a regex filter for one or more columns.

We will add a button to filter on the “name” and “firstname” columns :

private class FilterAction extends AbstractAction {
    private FilterAction() {
        super("Filter");
    }

    public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
        String regex = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Filter regex : ");

        sorter.setRowFilter(RowFilter.regexFilter(regex, 0, 1));
    }
}

Like you can see, it’s very easy to filter the content of table on one or several columns. Here is the result with a filter “mp” :

Filterable JTable

For flexibility, you can also extends RowFilter who has only one methods include(Entry entry) who indicates if a line must be included in the table or not.