Hey, I'm new to swing/gui programming and I was wondering, if I can copy the contents of one JPanel to be displayed on another? I have a split pane and want to be able to drag the big picture on the left to little boxes on the right but I'm not sure if it's possible.
Thanks in advance,
Mike
I'm creating a guitar chord creator application and it's split into two sides. On the left, in JPanel A, is an interactive fretboard, and on the right is a visual 2rows x 4columns array of JPanel's. When the user clicks on one JPanel I need the picture of the fretboard that appears in JPanel A to appear in this new JPanel.
Scaling aside, I'm not really sure how to do this.
Thanks.
> I'm creating a guitar chord creator application and it's split into two sides.
> On the left, in JPanel A, is an interactive fretboard, and on the right is a visual
> 2rows x 4columns array of JPanel's. When the user clicks on one JPanel
> I need the picture of the fretboard that appears in JPanel A to appear in this new
> JPanel.
The other shoe drops, good! Have you defined a class like Chord or
Fingering or FretboardModel? A class that represents the model or data
behind the state of your interactive panel? If the answer is no, go back to the drawing board.
Seriously, you need to define a data model that is being viewed in the left panel,
so that you can manipulate it. For example, make sure it has a clone or copy method,
which is what you need right now.
I do. I have a class that creates the whole interactive fretboard, called FretBoard, and the way I'm getting it to show up is just some code like JPanel temp = new FretBoard(); and it works fine.
Thanks for the clone tip. I guess I can just use it like
return this;
?
I would separate the GUI component:
public class FretboardView extends JComponent
from the model, say FretboardModel. This is the MVC pattern:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller
But in any case, if your cloning or copy method simply returns this,
you are in big trouble. When you alter the original, the "copy" will change, too!
> I do. I have a class that creates the whole
> interactive fretboard, called FretBoard, and the way
> I'm getting it to show up is just some code like
> JPanel temp = new FretBoard(); and it works fine.
>
> Thanks for the clone tip. I guess I can just use it
> like
> return this;
> ?
No, that's the View, he was talking about the Model. It's all part of the MVC pattern, which you should definitely google and read about. You have a class that represents your guitar chords (or whatever it's called, most of what I know about guitars I learned from Guitar Hero). Then you take your FratBoardView() class and show the model data. When the user changes something, the model is what get's changed, then you update the view based on the model. It sounds more complicated, but it's quite the opposite.
As far as using return this; in your clone method, that doesn't actually clone the object, it just returns another reference the same way this would:
MyClass mc1 = new MyClass();
MyClass mc2 = mc1;
You still have one object, now with two references to it.
