CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaswingarraylist
summerNight
summerNight

Reputation: 1496

Printing ArrayList contents into a TextArea

I have two ArrayLists called keys and values. 

keys = {"cat", "dog", "mouse"}
values = {"furry;white", "greyhound;beast", "little;rat"}

I would like to have them printed in a JTextArea (since I want them to be editable) or any other GUI component like this:

------------------
cat   |   furry
      |   white
-------------------
dog   |   greyhound
      |   beast
-------------------
mouse |   little
      |   rat

Should I create a new TextArea dynamically for each entry? If so how do I do that? Is that the right approach?

I have already tried using JTable but the issue with that is the cell height is fixed and text wrapping is a mess.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 714

Answers (2)

Neeraj Jain
Neeraj Jain

Reputation: 7730

You can use GridLayout

Map<String,String> map=new HashMap<String,String>(); //key-Value pair
map.put("cat",""furry\n white"); // \n So that you will get a new line character in text area
map.put("dog","greyhound \n beast");
JFrame frame = new JFrame();
frame.setLayout(new GridLayout(rows,columns));//In your case (map.size,2)
frame.setSize(300, 300);

//Now You need to Iterate through the Map.

for(Map.Entry<String,String>entry:map.entrySet()){
  JTextArea left=JTextArea(entry.getKey());
  JTextArea right=JTextArea(entry.getValue());
  frame.add(left);  //Adding each key to the Frame on left side
  frame.add(right); //This is the value you want in side of key
 }

frame.setVisible(true);

You will get something like this but in editable format

enter image description here

I have two ArrayLists called keys and values.

keys = {"cat", "dog", "mouse"} 
values = {"furry;white", "greyhound;beast", "little;rat"}

As you can see you are maintaining the List of keys and value seperately which is a bad practice , you can have Map (just read this link, it wil be helpfull) which stores the key and it's corresponding value in a single record ,

Now A little Suggestion

If you want to use multiple values against one key I suggest you to use MultiMap which maintains multiple values against one single key , It's very usefull library .

Upvotes: 2

sprinter
sprinter

Reputation: 27956

I would suggest having separate JTextField instances for each editable field and then lay them out using a GridLayout. Your code would end up something like this method to create a panel with the fields in it.

public JPanel createPanelForStringMap(Map<String, String> map) {
    JPanel panel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(map.size(), 2));
    for (Map.Entry entry: map.entrySet()) {
        panel.add(new JTextField(entry.getKey()));
        panel.add(new JTextField(entry.getValue()));
    }
    return panel;
}

Naturally you'd need to add code to do something with the values once they've been edited.

Upvotes: 2

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