Question

I have a various panels with various buttons. Some buttons should call a method initiating a search through an array list, other buttons should call methods that send information to different JTextArea boxes.
After adding an event listener for each button, how do I create specific actions depending on the button clicked in my actionPerformed method? Below is my code for various gui properties, as you can see there are 3 different JPanels, the buttons of each needing to perform different functions. I just need to know how to determine which button was clicked so I can link it to the appropriate method (already written in another class). Does this require an if statement? Can my other class access the buttons on the GUI if I make them public, or is there a more efficient way to do this.

JPanel foodOptions;
JButton[] button= new JButton[4]; //buttons to send selected object to info panel
static JComboBox[] box= new JComboBox[4];

JPanel search;
JLabel searchL ;
JTextField foodSearch;
JButton startSearch; //button to initialize search for typed food name
JTextArea searchInfo;

JPanel foodProfile;
JLabel foodLabel;
JTextArea foodInfo;
JButton addFood; //but to add food to consumed calories list

JPanel currentStatus;
JLabel foodsEaten;
JComboBox foodsToday;
JLabel calories;
JTextArea totalKCal;
JButton clearInfo; //button to clear food history

Answer 1

As per people’s comments, you need to use listeners of some sort, here is a real basic example to get you started, however I would define your listeners elsewhere in most cases, rather than on the fly:

JButton startSearch = new JButton("startSearch");
        JButton addFood = new JButton("addFood");

        startSearch.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {

            @Override
            public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent arg0) {
                //DO SEARCH RELATED THINGS

            }
        });

        addFood.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {

            @Override
            public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
                //DO FOOD ADD RELATED THINGS

            }
        });