Bug 82240 [Viewers] Need a content provider for tables that gets elements lazily
Currently all of our viewers assume that all of the elements are avialble. In the case of a virtual table we also want to be able to load elements as they become visible rather than all at once (common issue for databases). Here are some of the issues 1) Need to setItemCount on the table from the content provider 2) Need a getElements(start,finish) method on the content provider 3) Need to decide how to handle staleness. If there are a million items and the viewer just sits there scrolled to the bottom that is a million TableItems and a million Objects represented. How do we manage memory for this?
bundles/org.eclipse.jface/src/org/eclipse/jface/viewers/StructuredViewer.java
if (filters == null)
			filters = new ArrayList();
		filters.add(filter);
		refresh();
	}
	/**
	 * Asserts that the given array of elements is itself non- <code>null</code>
	 * and contains no <code>null</code> elements.
	 * 
	 * @param elements
	 *            the array to check
	 */
	protected void assertElementsNotNull(Object[] elements) {
		Assert.isNotNull(elements);
		for (int i = 0, n = elements.length; i < n; ++i) {
			Assert.isNotNull(elements[i]);
		}
	}
	/**
	 * Associates the given element with the given widget. Sets the given item's
	 * data to be the element, and maps the element to the item in the element
	 * map (if enabled).
	 * 
	 * @param element
	 *            the element
	 * @param item
	 *            the widget
	 */
	protected void associate(Object element, Item item) {
		Object data = item.getData();