96 JToggleButtons - how to simply read the state of all?

[Metuschelach]

Hello,
after hours and hours of trying and searchung the web, I'm here now.
I have a window with 96 JToggleButtons. What is the smartest and easiest way to read the state of them all? I want save the states in an array.
I first tried to do it with an ItemListener and was able to get the state, but then I didn't know which JToggleButton it was.

ItemListener buttonListener = new ItemListener() { 
  @Override public void itemStateChanged( ItemEvent e ) { 
    System.out.print( ((JToggleButton ) e.getItem()).getText() ); 
    System.out.println( e.getStateChange() == ItemEvent.SELECTED ? 
                        " selected" : " unselected" ); 
  } 
}; 
 
toggleButton1 .addItemListener( buttonListener ); 
toggleButton2.addItemListener( buttonListener );

[DarrylBurke]

I would use ActionListener in preference to ItemListener, and take one of two approaches:

Implement an ActionListener with a "private final int index" field and add a separate listener to each button

OR

Extend JToggleButton to add a "private final int index" field with a public accessor and detect the index in a common listener.

Depending on how the state array is used, I might prefer a BitSet instead of a boolean array.

db

[Metuschelach]

Hi Darryl.Burke,
thanks for your answer. I'm using an ArrayList of JToggleButtons now, as found here: ActionListener zusammenfassen? - java-forum.org:

private ArrayList<JToggleButton> list1 = new ArrayList<JToggleButton>();
        list1.add(0, panelProfile.getLoad1()); 
    	list1.add(1, panelProfile.getLoad2());
    	list1.add(2, panelProfile.getLoad3());
    	list1.add(3, panelProfile.getLoad4());

    	
    	for (int i=0; i<4; i++){
    		list1.get(i).addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
              public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){
                    System.out.println(list1.indexOf(e.getSource()));
              }
        });
          
        }

That works very well.

[DarrylBurke]

Glad to know you found a workable solution. A couple of notes:

-- Instead of a whole series of methods getLoad1, getLoad2 etc. it may be cleaner to have a single getLoad(int index) method

-- Coding to the interface is preferred for the flexibility of being able to make just a single change if you later decide to use a different implementation. Thus:

// private ArrayList<JToggleButton> list1 = new ArrayList<JToggleButton>();
private List<JToggleButton> list1 = new ArrayList<JToggleButton>();

-- In the example code you posted, the upper limit of the for loop is hardcoded to 4, which you would require to change manually if the number of buttons changed. A better approach is to set the limit according to the size() of the List. Thus:

// for (int i=0; i<4; i++){
for (int i = 0; i < list1.size(); i++) {

-- Adequate whitespace and consistent indentation improve code readability. Recommended reading:
Code Conventions for the Java(TM) Programming Language: Contents

db

[Metuschelach]

Hi Darryl.Burke,

thank you for your helpful answer. Sorry for responding late.

Metuschelach