Thread: Create buttons at runtime

Hello all I am trying to read for example 4 html files from a directory then at runtime the buttons are created (this is important as at runtime there could be 5 html files etc) which will correspond to each file so when button 1 is pressed html file 1 is loaded etc. Any ideas anyone? thanks.

Oh on a side note I am poor at creating gui's so i used netbeans to create my GUI but i am unable to add my own code to then create buttons at runtime.

Originally Posted by rtumatt

Hello all I am trying to read for example 4 html files from a directory then at runtime the buttons are created (this is important as at runtime there could be 5 html files etc) which will correspond to each file so when button 1 is pressed html file 1 is loaded etc. Any ideas anyone? thanks.

Oh on a side note I am poor at creating gui's so i used netbeans to create my GUI but i am unable to add my own code to then create buttons at runtime.

Create the buttons based upon the number of html files in a for loop. If you need to keep references then store them in a List.

Object[] htmlFiles;
//load html files
JButton[] buttons = new JButton[htmlFiles.length];
for ( int i = 0; i < buttons.length; i++ ){
buttons[i] = new JButton();
//add button to gui
}

If it were me I'd ditch the buttons and use a JComboBox, from there you can add the items dynamically and have the GUI look a but more fluid - in this case you can use NetBeans to arrange your combo box in the GUI, then dynamically add the items to the JComboBox reference

Object[] htmlFiles;
//load html files
for ( int i = 0; i < htmlFiles.length; i++ ){
    comboBox.addItem(htmlFiles[i]);
}

That helped me out more than you can imagine, thankyou! i have the problem of the positioning of the buttons now all being ontop of each other :S