Question

I have a package named images in my src directory. I have quite a few images that I use in my project. I use a method in my only Swing class to get Icons.

 public Icon getIcon(String name) {
    Icon icon = null;
    URL url = null;
    ClassLoader classLoader = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();
    try {
       url = classLoader.getResource(name);
       icon = new ImageIcon(url);
    } 
    catch (Exception e) {
       System.out.println("Couldn't find " + getClass().getName() + "/" + name);
       e.printStackTrace();
    }
 return icon;
}

To get a Icon

getIcon("/images/pdfClose.png");

This works great for Icons, but in my SWT classes, I use Images.

Is there a way in SWT to copy what the getIcon() method is doing?
Is it possible to rewrite the method to get images?

public ImageIcon getImage(String name) {
   ImageIcon image = null;
   URL url = null;
   ClassLoader classLoader = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();
   try {
     url = classLoader.getResource(name);
     image = new ImageIcon(url);
   } 
   catch (Exception e) {
      System.out.println("Couldn't find " + getClass().getName() + "/" + name);
      e.printStackTrace();
   }
 return image;
}

I know it throws the error
This instance method cannot override the static method from Dialog

But is there a work around?

Answer 1

I don’t really see, where you are struggling. This is what I do to load images:

public static Image loadImage(String path, boolean inJar)
{
    Image newImage = null;

    try
    {
        if(inJar)
        {
            newImage = new Image(null, YOUR_MAIN_CLASS.class.getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream(path));
        }
        else
        {
            newImage = new Image(null, path);
        }
    }
    catch(SWTException ex)
    {
        System.out.println("Couldn't find " + path);
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    return newImage;
}

Note that I don’t keep my images in the src folder, since that folder is for source files. I have a folder img in the root of the project and access the images via:

Image image = Images.loadImage("img/myImage.png", true);