🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 15 Jan 2001 17:23:02 -0500, Steve Swett wrote:

[snip]
> What is the best way to do something like that?  I'm pretty new
> with Java, so I don't know whether I should be looking at a dialog,
> option pane, or a card layout solution.  (or something else)

I assume what you mean by a CardLayout would be to switch the card on 
the frame to show the other information.  Although that would not be 
hard to do, I would avoid that approach because I think the interface 
would be somewhat confusing to the user.  Opening a dialog is more 
typical in that sort of a situation, so the user would understand it 
more readily.

The difference between the dialog and option pane approaches are in the 
implementation, and they should achieve essentially the same thing.  
The JOptionPane class provides convenient methods for placing the 
buttons and showing your object in a dialog.

If JOptionPane does what you want it to do, then it is probably the 
better approach, since it is a little easier.  But if you want to do 
things that JOptionPane does not handle, then you will find yourself 
fighting it, and you would be better off using a JDialog.

One example where JOptionPane does not work very well is if you need to 
validate some input and if it is invalid, display an error dialog and 
then allow the user to correct the problem.  The problem there is that 
the JOptionPane showXxxxDialog() methods close the dialog before they 
give control back to the caller.  In these cases, a JDialog works much 
better.

-- 
Regards,

John McGrath [TeamB]

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