Javafx slider: text as tick label - slider

Question

I just started to learn Javafx, and I really like it so far. However in my current project I would need to use text as the tick labels for the javafx slider. I googled it a lot, but couldn't find any help. So for example I would like a slider with 4-5 positions, and them being "bad", "good", etc. instead of 1,2,3,...
I know I could build a custom UI manually with labels placed at the correct places, but I need to generate the sliders with custom text, and diofferent length every time, so it wouldn't work. In swing it is possible to change the labels with a hashtable for example, so my question is, is it possible to do it in Javafx?

Answer 1

Here is a sample using slider.setLabelFormatter.
import javafx.application.Application;
import javafx.geometry.Insets;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.scene.control.Slider;
import javafx.scene.layout.HBox;
import javafx.stage.Stage;
import javafx.util.StringConverter;
public class SlidingScale extends Application {
#Override
public void start(Stage primaryStage) throws Exception{
Slider slider = new Slider(0, 3, 0);
slider.setMin(0);
slider.setMax(3);
slider.setValue(1);
slider.setMinorTickCount(0);
slider.setMajorTickUnit(1);
slider.setSnapToTicks(true);
slider.setShowTickMarks(true);
slider.setShowTickLabels(true);
slider.setLabelFormatter(new StringConverter<Double>() {
#Override
public String toString(Double n) {
if (n < 0.5) return "Novice";
if (n < 1.5) return "Intermediate";
if (n < 2.5) return "Advanced";
return "Expert";
}
#Override
public Double fromString(String s) {
switch (s) {
case "Novice":
return 0d;
case "Intermediate":
return 1d;
case "Advanced":
return 2d;
case "Expert":
return 3d;
default:
return 3d;
}
}
});
slider.setMinWidth(380);
HBox layout = new HBox(slider);
layout.setPadding(new Insets(30));
primaryStage.setScene(new Scene(layout));
primaryStage.show();
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
launch(args);
}
}
The sample above only works in Java 8 due to a bug in JavaFX 2.2.
Some of the labels disappear as you make the the slider smaller, so I set a min width on the slider so that the labels remain (an alternate solution, might be to set a new label formatter with abbreviated labels used if the slider is sized small).
You might also be interested in voting for or commenting on the following feature request: RT-27863 A LabelFormatter isn't enough to customize Slider ticks.