Thread: Applet

Well, to point you in the right direction;
Yes, you are going to need an if statement in your actionPerformed method.

However, realize that unless called inside HTML, you're applet could be re-sized. And, inside HTML, I believe it can be re-sized up to a point, so you will have to dynamically calculate the allowed maximum size of the rectangle. Also note that because you are not using some kind of layout manager (except the default FlowLayout), when your applet is resized, it ruins the organization. If you ignore that, I suppose you could use some testing and decide what the max size of the rectangle could be.

Ok, but I'm really not sure how I would set up the if statement. The only thing I can think of is if(height > MaximumSize || width < MinimumSize){ <code> } but afterr that, I'm not sure. I'm not even sure if my IF statement is correct.

If the sizes entered by the user are out of bounds, display an error message and ignore the invalid values.

Are you trying to control the size of the applet in the browser's window or the size of the shape that the applet draws in the paint method?

Thats what i'm trying to figure out. in my first post, i put exactly what i needed to do that the teacher was asking. here it is again.


Write an applet that draws a rectangle according to the height and width the user enters; i.e. you must get the height and width from the user and have a draw button that will draw the rectangle on the applet. Make sure you restrict the maximum and minimum size of the applet such that the user cannot enter a negative number or zero for the min, and limit the max so that the rectangle will be properly displayed in the applet. Make the default size of the applet no smaller than 400 x 400.

There seems to be the sizes of two things to worry about. The applet and the rectangle.
It used to be that the applet's size was determined by the width and height attributes in the applet tag.
Can you assume that the size of the applet is fixed and only worry about the size of the rectangle that you are to draw?

I determined the size of the actual applet itself. But now all i have to do is control the size of the rectangle itself. But now what i am trying to do, is to have an error message appear if the user enters a size that is over the applet size. for example, in the applet tag, i declared that the height and width of the applet is 400x500. if the user were to enter in a number above 400 for the height, i would like to have an error message pop up saying that you have gone over the maximum size of the applet. I am to get the message to pop up, but the rectangle is still being drawn.

but the rectangle is still being drawn.

Use separate variables for getting the values and for drawing the rectangle.
Validate the given values first. If ok, set the values used for drawing.
Otherwise leave the old values as is.

if i use the variables "height" and "width" as the variables to draw the rectangle, i'm not sure how to implement the separate variables for getting the values

how to implement the separate variables for getting the values

                height = Integer.parseInt(heightField.getText());
		width = Integer.parseInt(widthField.getText());

Don't use height and width here. Use another variable that you can test to be in range. Then copy them.

ok, so you're saying that I should have to more lines of code that look like that, but with different variable names?

I said: Use separate variables for getting the values and for drawing the rectangle.
Read the user's values into local variables, test the values are in range, then copy those variable's values into the ones used to draw the rectangle.

can u show me an example? I've got a lot of things going through my head that I can't even think clearly.

pseudo code:

int val = get a value from user into a local variable
if(test if val is good) {
   savedVal = val;  // save the good value 
}else {
   tell user input was bad. leave savedVal as it was
}

ok, so lets say i used UHgt for the local variable. so I would have

 
int UHgt = 700;
 
if(UHgt < 700)
{
Height = UHgt;
}
else
{
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog("Please enter a new height");
}

I can get the error message to come up, but the rectangle still draws. How do I fix that?

actually, it just came to me. I figured it out. I had my repaint function in the wrong place. by changing the place of the repaint function to inside the else statement, i was able to achieve what i wanted. thank you very much for all of your help. i really appreciate all of your help. and for the height, i actually did it a different way than u had suggested. for my applet size, i have the height set at 700 for right now. so i created an if statement using height and did it that way. so my new if statement is

 
if ( height <= 0 || height > 700)
{
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog("Enter new height");
}

so everything works out just fine.

actually, I have one last question. I've been trying to set an image as my background, but have not had any success at all. I've only been able to position an image on the screen, but not able to set it as my background. How would I go abouts in doing that?