One of the really neat things about the JavaFX ListView control is the Cell API, and the ability to have dynamically variable row heights, without sacrificing performance or scalability. To accomplish this, we’ll write a custom Cell factory which will create a Cell who’s size depends on some state.

To recap briefly, to remain scalable and fast, the ListView reuses Cells for rendering each row in the ListView. Because it reuses Cells, each Cell needs to be designed so that it does the right thing no matter what row it is asked to represent — even empty rows which are used only for filling out a ListView and not for actually holding valid data. Read the rest of this entry »