Question

I’m currently designing a menu with several screens with multiple buttons on each screen. To use buttons on top of the background image, which is in a jLabel (by default, I can’t put buttons on TOP of the jLabel), I used GridBagLayout with two panels/menu screen, one panel containing the buttons (opaque = false) and one panel with the background image, or jLabel. In order to switch the current panels being displayed, depending on where the user is in the menu, I made each menu screen (aka. every 2 panels) in separate methods, not classes.

Now, I’ve come to the point where I’m working on parts of the interface that are unnecessarily complicated, and I don’t feel GridBag will serve my purposes, so I was wondering if there was a different way to draw my background image, still being able to use my buttons on top of the image.

The most popular way I looked up was overriding the paintComponent method, but I can’t do that, since I’ve made my JPanels in separate methods, not classes. They’re all contained in my original JFrame.

Help would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

Just added this code, but my background remains white for some reason? Trying the other suggestion right now, thanks guys!

private void mainPanel() {

    icon = new ImageIcon(getClass().getResource("/phantasma/menuv1.png"));
mainContainer1 = new javax.swing.JPanel() {
        @Override
        protected void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
            g.drawImage(icon.getImage(), 0,0, null);
            super.paintComponent(g);
        }
    };

Answer 1

In my comment above I state:

You can always create an anonymous inner JPanel-derived class and override the paintComponent method there if need be.

As an example of what I mean, you can override paintComponent in any JPanel that you create whether it’s derived from a stand-alone class or created within a method. For e.g.,

import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.Graphics;

import javax.swing.*;

public class AnonInnerPanel {

   private static void createAndShowGui() {
      JPanel mainPanel = new JPanel() {
         @Override
         protected void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
            super.paintComponent(g);
         }

         @Override
         public Dimension getPreferredSize() {
            return new Dimension(300, 200);
         }
      };

      JFrame frame = new JFrame("AnonInnerPanel");
      frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
      frame.getContentPane().add(mainPanel);
      frame.pack();
      frame.setLocationByPlatform(true);
      frame.setVisible(true);
   }

   public static void main(String[] args) {
      SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
         public void run() {
            createAndShowGui();
         }
      });
   }
}