How to add

[alex.start]

My add_item method which gets item details, creates item with a custom constructor then adds it to my array list

public ArrayList<Item_props> add_item(ArrayList<Item_props> items)
	{
		Messages mesg = new Messages();
		String name = mesg.name();//ask for item price
		double price = mesg.price();//prompt for price
		int id = (int)(Math.random() * 50);//produce item id
		int quant = mesg.quantity();
		items.add(new Item_props(name, id, price,quant));//create item, store in arrayList
		return items;
	}

This is also in my class User which has method that executes on menu select. This method creates a drop down list and asks the user to select an item(element) to remove. However I am unable to get all the item names to display and I want the amount of Indexes to be based on how many items the user adds.

public ArrayList<Item_props> remove_item(ArrayList<Item_props> item)
	{
		Object choice = (String)JOptionPane.showInputDialog(null,"Select an item to remove","Shoppa Menu",
		JOptionPane.QUESTION_MESSAGE,null,new Object[]{item.get(0).getItem_name()},"");
		if(item.contains(choice))
			item.remove(choice);
		return item;
	}

What can I do to acquire all arraylist elements in the remove_item method???

[Fubarable]

Moved from Advanced Java forum as there is nothing advanced about this question. Code tags added to aid readability of posted code. Bold markups removed to aid readability.

[quad64bit]

The contains method in the arraylist will look for an instance of the same object, you can't just throw strings at an "Item_props" array and expect it to find anything. Rather, you need to iterate through the list of all Item_props, and look for one who's field contains the choice text. Then you can remove that item.

[alex.start]

All good! I made created a string array which sorted the item names of each item object in the arraylist so this:
null,new Object[]{item.get(0).getItem_name()},"");
went to this:
null,ti},""); ti being my array of strings containing my item object names and the item remove works perfect! Thanks for the input!

[quad64bit]

No problem.

For future reference, it can be a lot easier if you use Generics instead of plain Object types. When something is declared as Object, you have to do a lot of casting to work with it's fields and methods.

See this link:
Lesson: Generics (Updated) (The Java™ Tutorials > Learning the Java Language)