Question

I have 10 JLabels which I want to have the same border. It is a number that is manageable by hand but to grow as a programmer I want to know if there is a way to make this easier.

I have tried with a for each loop that goes true all the components of the panel the labels are on, and then use the method setBorder(...). But this doesn’t work obviously because the objects are recognized as Components instead of JLabels.

How do I automate the border assignment to a JLabel?

Answer 1

The answer provided by @Atreys will suffice, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Another option would be to create a class that extends JLabel and assigns a border within its constructor. Therefore, all instances will have the same border, as per your request. This will also avoid having to clumsily iterate over a collection of Components, use the instanceof operator, and then typecast, which isn’t really OOP.

---

public final class BorderedJLabel extends JLabel{
    public BorderedJLabel(){
        // assign border
    }
}

---

Addendum:

And if you wanted to avoid the verbosity of having to type new BorderedJLabel() for each new BorderedJLabel instance, you could peruse a static factory method, as such

public final class BorderedJLabel extends JLabel{
    private BorderedJLabel(){
        // assign border
    }

    public static final BorderedJLabel newInstance(){
        return new BorderedJLabel();
    }
}

Given this design, you’ll be able to create new BorderedJLabel instances more succinctly by simply typing BorderedJLabel.newInstance().