TableRef

public struct TableRef : TableProtocol

AtkTable should be implemented by components which present elements ordered via rows and columns. It may also be used to present tree-structured information if the nodes of the trees can be said to contain multiple “columns”. Individual elements of an AtkTable are typically referred to as “cells”. Those cells should implement the interface AtkTableCell, but Atk doesn’t require them to be direct children of the current AtkTable. They can be grand-children, grand-grand-children etc. AtkTable provides the API needed to get a individual cell based on the row and column numbers.

Children of AtkTable are frequently “lightweight” objects, that is, they may not have backing widgets in the host UI toolkit. They are therefore often transient.

Since tables are often very complex, AtkTable includes provision for offering simplified summary information, as well as row and column headers and captions. Headers and captions are AtkObjects which may implement other interfaces (AtkText, AtkImage, etc.) as appropriate. AtkTable summaries may themselves be (simplified) AtkTables, etc.

Note for implementors: in the past, AtkTable required that all the cells should be direct children of AtkTable, and provided some index based methods to request the cells. The practice showed that that forcing made AtkTable implementation complex, and hard to expose other kind of children, like rows or captions. Right now, index-based methods are deprecated.

The TableRef type acts as a lightweight Swift reference to an underlying AtkTable instance. It exposes methods that can operate on this data type through TableProtocol conformance. Use TableRef only as an unowned reference to an existing AtkTable instance.