Question

A shout out to the Swing gurus out there!!

I’ve been doing Swing programming for several years but have always been unclear on this.

As you know Swing/AWT gives you several ways to execute a particular action when a button is clicked. I’ve seen it done several different ways in the applications I’ve worked on. The project I’m currently working on tends to follow this approach:

someButton.setActionCommand("mycommand");
someButton.addActionListener(listener);

–snip–

public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent event) {
    String command = event.getActionCommand();
    if (command.equals("mycommand"))
       doThis();
    else if (command.equals("someothercommand"))
       doThat();
etc.

This seems kind of clunky to me – is there any benefit to this style of programming, or is it better to use Swing Actions?

Or are there different situations where the different approaches are better/worse?

Answer 1

IMO, it is better to use separate listeners for Actions.

That way you leave the delegating of what action should happen up to Swing. You don’t have to compare Strings to decide what to do.

Having one huge ActionListener for more than one action feels like breaking the pattern to me.