CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaswingproperties
mort
mort

Reputation: 13598

What's the name property of swing components for?

What's the intended use of the name property of swing components? Is it used swing internally?

Background: A colleague implemented a internationalization mechanism by storing the key for the text string in the name property. Then, he simply walks through all swing-elements and gets the key stored in the name property of the component. He argued that the name property doesn't seem to be used otherwise and that this was the easiest way to do it.

Upvotes: 9

Views: 2808

Answers (3)

jfpoilpret
jfpoilpret

Reputation: 10519

In my experience, I have never encountered any problem when setting the name of a Swing component. For "leaf" Swing components (that you use diretly, such as JLabel, JButton, JMenu...), name is always left null by Swing.

As @kelopatra mentioned, inner components of "complex" Swing components (e.g. JColorChooser) may have names assigned to them, but you generally cannot access these inner components directly (other than walking through the copmponent hierarchy tree).

As per uses of the name property, it is often used for resource injection (i18n), but it can also be extremely useful for UI automation (for tests or demos), because most robots (e.g. FEST Swing) will be able to find a component by name, provided you assign unique names to your components.

Upvotes: 3

kleopatra
kleopatra

Reputation: 51535

Is it used swing internally?

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: rather easy to verify - simply build some ui and walk the tree. Or look at f.i. the SwingLabs-Demo (can't resist :-),

  • click on the JXTree demo task and see the names of some children of a simple JFrame as set by Swing (shown in the treenode, parenthesis).
  • change the LAF to Nimbus, click on the JXTreeTable demo task, move the mouse over the scrollBar of the treeTable and see the name of scrollBar buttons as set by the LAF

Next question is: does that Swing internal setting interfere with setting the name for application reasons?

Short answer: hard to tell, most probably not

Longer answer: the internal settings I have seen are unlikely to be overwritten for application needs as they are deeply hidden in the container hierarchy. In fact, some frameworks like f.i. SAF does use the name for resource injection (similarly to what you describe your collegue is doing). My own (unmaintained) FormBuilder framework did for layout constraints.

The vague (read: undefined) definition of the name property is both an advantage and a trap:

  • adv: yes, any code can use it, it has no real contract
  • trap: there are possibly many competing users of that property

Upvotes: 4

StanislavL
StanislavL

Reputation: 57421

Name of component from javadoc "Set or get the name of the component. This can be useful when you need to associate text with a component that does not display text.". So I think it's fine to use the name.

You can also place something in the component's properties.

Upvotes: 9

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