DateRanger...

 Aloha,

Last week I needed some kind of a date picker which I can use to select ranges of dates. So I knew that I once created such a control when I was working for Canoo back in the days. But when I found it I saw that it was realized in JavaFX 2.0 that was based on JDK7 and made use of Skin and Behavior classes which changed in JDK8. 

Because I was not keen on rewriting that stuff I decided to simply create a new control...just for the fun of it :)

And because I used a lot of Canvas recently I made the decision to make use of CSS for this control and not use the Canvas node for it. Using CSS makes the whole thing more usable for standard applications because you can easily style the control to your needs where when using the Canvas node it needs more programming effort to get the same styleability.

So the first step was to figure out a control that I like to have some kind of template.

And I found this one...

It's not really fancy but I really like it's compact look which has all the info that I need. So I've created my version of it which looks as follows:

As you can see I more or less created a copy of the control. So the next step was to add the functionality to select a range of dates.

I've simply added a key listener and if you select a date by clicking somewhere with the mouse you can press the `SHIFT` key with the next click and it will create a range of dates for you.

The range then looks as follows:

Most of the nodes can be styled using CSS and you will find all the available styles in the `date-ranger.css` file.

The plain DateRanger comes without the month and year label and the buttons, so you can also use it for only showing the month. If you would like to use the version above, you can use the DateRangerControl which is also part of the code. This is in principle just a BorderPane that comes with the label and buttons on the top.

It's nothing really fancy but maybe it will be useful for one or the other.

The code is available on github and also on maven central.

Well I guess that's it for 2021...I wish all of you a merry christmas and a happy new year...oh and keep coding... :)