Thread: Please help, newb with a simple question...

Hi, I am new to programming, and trying to learn by making a few simple programs.

My problem involves passing a reference between classes.

I learned how to pass references via constructors, but now I have run into a dilemma. I want to pass a reference of two objects to each other, but have run into the problem that one must be created before the other in order to reference it. it's kind of a chicken and egg situation.

 
	  TimerPanel timer = new TimerPanel(input);
	  InputPanel input = new InputPanel(control);
 
	  panel.add (timer);
	  panel.add (input);

The constructors of each class will accept a reference of the other, but obviously, with this code, when I try to pass the variable input to the new TimerPanel, it cannot find input because it hasn't been created yet, and tells me the symbol cannot be found.

Does anyone know how to fix this? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

You're probably right, it's probably a bad design. Like I said, I'm very new, so I'm kind of trying to play by ear... I guess I'll reevaluate my design. But I don't even know what a setter method is, thank you for your suggestion, I'll look it up and find out. if you have the time, it would be helpful if you could give me a quick example of what something like that would look like to get me started though.

Why not just declare and define input before timer. Then you wouldn't have the issue.

Originally Posted by DougFane

Why not just declare and define input before timer. Then you wouldn't have the issue.

Ah, sorry, I had a typo in my code...

it's supposed to be:

 
	  TimerPanel timer = new TimerPanel(input);
	  InputPanel input = new InputPanel(timer);
 
	  panel.add (timer);
	  panel.add (input);

I guess it depends, if you actually need information from one in order to create the other, then you need to rethink your whole design. However, if you simply need to pass one object to the other's constructor (say you need a TimerPanel to make an InputPanel, but not vice versa) you could write the code like this:

 
TimerPanel timer;
InputPanel input;
 
timer = new TimerPanel(input);
input = new InputPanel(input);

hope this helps

I had a typo as well. It was meant to be InputPanel = new InputPanel(timer);

I wasn't really thinking about the fact that the timer object hadn't really been created yet. My bad.