Swing Hacks

Add Status Bars to Windows #36

Chapter 5, Windows, Dialogs, and Frames

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191

HACK

Add a Separator Panel

Before you can add the components to the right side, you need to make a

separator panel. This is actually a really simple component that draws a gray

line and a white line in the middle of the panel. Look on the right and left of

the 42.3 MB text in Figure 5-7 to see what the separators should look like.

Example 5-2 shows the

SeparatorPanel

code.

And the Rest...

Now that the right panel has been added and you’ve got the code for the

SeparatorPanel, you can add the rest of the components to the status bar.

You’ll be adding two columns to the layout—one for the

SeparatorPanel

and one for the actual component. In order to add the components at the

correct location, you’ll need to cache the

x- and y-coordinates and incre-

ment the coordinates as you add components. So, create two fields—

layoutCoordinateX and layoutCoordinateY—to keep track of the current

coordinates:

public void addRightComponent(JComponent component, int dialogUnits){

layout.appendColumn(new ColumnSpec("2dlu"));

layout.appendColumn(new ColumnSpec(dialogUnits + "dlu"));

layoutCoordinateX++;

contentPanel.add(

new SeparatorPanel(Color.GRAY, Color.WHITE),

new CellConstraints(layoutCoordinateX, layoutCoordinateY)

);

Example 5-2. A panel to separate sections of the status bar

public class SeparatorPanel extends JPanel {

private Color leftColor; ...