Thread: Make JTextArea accept input from JButton

Hey everybody,

I don't really have a whats wrong with my code as much as a how would i do such a thing.

So i have a JTextArea that asks whats your name, and then a bunch of other questions. Then i have a textfield and button for input to the JTextArea since i was very unsure of how to do something like System.in/out in eclipse.

But i can't just put like an integer to keep track of what question its on.

Im trying to figure out a way to make my JTextArea wait for me to hit the enter button and then accept the input into a string.

Heres the code, their was more but i found this pretty tight snag so i decided to start over. Basically this will just let you see my GUI

 
import java.awt.Color;
import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.GridLayout;
import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
import java.awt.event.ActionListener;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.util.Scanner;
 
import javax.swing.BorderFactory;
import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.JTextArea;
import javax.swing.JTextField;
 
public class General extends JFrame{
	JPanel Outside;
	JPanel info1, info2;
	JButton[][] Buttons = new JButton[30][30];
	JTextField Input;
	JButton Enter;
	static JTextArea Output;
	General() throws FileNotFoundException{
		setLayout(null);
		setBounds(0, 0, 1498, 800);
		Outside = new JPanel(new GridLayout(30, 30));
		Outside.setBounds(10,10,700,700);
		for(int a = 0; a < 30; a++){
			for(int b = 0; b < 30; b++){
				Buttons[a][b] = new JButton();
				Buttons[a][b].setBorder(BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.BLACK));
				Buttons[a][b].setBackground(Color.WHITE);
				Outside.add(Buttons[a][b]);
			}
		}
		Input = new JTextField();
		Input.setBounds(10, 720, 602, 25);
		Enter = new JButton("ENTER");
		Enter.setBounds(612, 720, 90, 25);
		Enter.addActionListener(new InputListener());
		Output = new JTextArea();
		Output.setBounds(730,10,300,735);
		Output.setBorder(BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.BLACK,3));
		info1 = new JPanel();
		info1.setLayout(null);
		info1.setBounds(1050, 10, 200, 735);
		info1.setBorder(BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.BLACK));
		info2 = new JPanel();
		info2.setLayout(null);
		info2.setBounds(1270, 10, 200, 735);
		info2.setBorder(BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.BLACK));
		add(info1);
		add(info2);
		add(Output);
		add(Enter);
		add(Input);
		add(Outside);
		setVisible(true);
		setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
	}
	public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException {
		new General();
 
	}
	public class InputListener implements ActionListener{
		public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
 
		}
	}
 
}

But you'd have to have it clear it afterward after it did whatever you wanted it to do, or else thins will likely go wrong.

(:

Moved to - AWT / Java Swing - Java Programming Forums

Sounds like you want to listen for action events for when the JButton gets clicked. See: How to Write an Action Listener (The Java™ Tutorials > Creating a GUI With JFC/Swing > Writing Event Listeners)

It sounds like you're trying to turn a naturally object oriented and event driven model and forcing it to be sequential. This is very difficult to do, and a rather poor GUI design (it can lead to GUI's which become unresponsive). However, you don't need to do this.
The reason you don't want your program to loop and wait for the button to be pressed is because the rest of your GUI (painting, updating text inside the textbox, updating the little flashing carat, etc.) will not be able to happen, and this will freeze your GUI. You could run this on a separate thread, but you would just be wasting system resources and could enter race conditions if you don't handle multi-threading properly.

Simply put whatever code you want to handle a user clicking the Enter button into a method, then call that method from actionPerformed with the appropriate parameters.

public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)
{
    if(e.getSource() == Enter) // the Enter button sent this event
    {
        handleUserAnswer(Input.getText()); // method to handle whatever the user inputed
    }
}