Question

I am fairly new to java so bear with me please, basically, below I have a tabbed pane for each of the four rooms in the rooms Arraylist, and I am creating buttons in each tab depending how many lights each room has, How can I associate the buttons in each tab with a specified the rooms?. So like when I click the light button in the Room 1 tab, the event listener knows that the button belongs to the room1?

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.awt.*;
import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.event.*;

public class MasterGUI extends JFrame implements ActionListener{

public MasterGUI(){

}

public void DisplayFrame(){
    ArrayList<Rooms> rooms;
    rooms = Building.getRoomList();

    JFrame master = new JFrame("Solar Master Control Panel"); 
    master.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
    Container content = master.getContentPane();
    content.setBackground(Color.lightGray);

    JTabbedPane tabbedPane = new JTabbedPane();
    JPanel tmpPanel;

    for(int x = 0; x < rooms.size(); x++){
        tmpPanel = new JPanel();
        String roomName = rooms.get(x).getName();
        int id = rooms.get(x).getId();
        tabbedPane.addTab(roomName + " Room " + id, tmpPanel);
    }

    for(int x = 0; x < rooms.size(); x++){
        for(int i = 0; i < rooms.get(x).roomLights.size(); i++){
            int num = i + 1;
            ((JPanel) tabbedPane.getComponentAt(x)).add(new JButton("Light" + num));
        }
    }

    master.add(tabbedPane, BorderLayout.CENTER);
    master.setSize(800, 600);
    content.add(tabbedPane);
    master.setVisible(true);
}

public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){

}  

Answer 1

First of, you need to add the ActionListener to the button so it will be called when the button is clicked.

...
JButton button = new JButton("Light" + num);
button.addActionListener(this);
((JPanel) tabbedPane.getComponentAt(x)).add(button);
...

As far as differentiating between which button was clicked, there are two main ways to address this. The first is to use getSource() on the ActionEvent to get a reference to the object that triggered the event. You can use this to decide how you want to proceed further. The other option is to have MasterGUI not implement ActionListener. Instead, make a unique ActionListener for each button that immediately know what action needs to occur when it was called. The first option makes it easier to register listeners, but requires more work in the handler to determine the source. I prefer the second method.