Java Garage

Creating Menus

It is easy in Swing to create menus. First, you create a menu bar to hold each menu. A menu is the little area that drops down out of the menu bar.

//create the menu bar
JMenuBar menuBar = new JMenuBar();

// Create a menu
JMenu menu = new JMenu("Tools");
menuBar.add(menu);

// Create a menu item
JMenuItem hacksaw = new JMenuItem("Hacksaw");
hacksaw.addActionListener(someActionListener);
menu.add(hacksaw);

// Install the menu bar in the frame
frame.setJMenuBar(menuBar);

The main thing to note here is that clicking menu items creates an action event that you need to handle with an ActionListener implementation. There is a good example of using menus in the Garage Text Editor Toolkit example.