How do I create a TopComponent to show an explorer view?
Explorer views are generic Swing components, not subclasses of TopComponent , the Swing panel class that is used for top level components (tabs) in the main window. So an explorer view component is added to a TopComponent, using the TopComponent as a Swing container for the view. A little bit of plumbing is needed to wire up an explorer view to the global Node selection so that code that is sensitive to selection such as context sensitive actions . Basically you want the TopComponent to expose the selection in your Explorer View so that when your view has focus, the global selection that affects everything will be whatever the user selects in your view. In olden times, there was a convenient class called ExplorerPanel (now in org.openide.compat ) which would do this for you; due to a tragedy of being in the wrong package, it is now deprecated, but the required plumbing is not hard: public class MyView extends TopComponent implements ExplorerManager.Provider { private final ExplorerMana
