Question

I’m just wondering why I get a “cannot resolve symbol initialText” with the following code. isItA is a boolean which the user selects earlier depending on which type of text (A or B) they are about to paste into the text area. There are 2 potential strings for initialText, and the one which is outputted depends on the boolean isItA. I dont get why this error pops when i use initialText outside the if/else statement; if is inside the ‘if/else’ statement, the compiler should be able to resolve the string outside right? I’m currently using GWT in IntelliJ. At this point I am still sort of noob at java, so a basic explanation of why this is happening would be greatly appreciated 🙂 Thanks in advance. A snippet of the code is below.

protected TextArea getNewTextArea() {
    if ( newTextArea == null ) {

        if (isItA){
            final String initialText = "Please paste valid text A here, and then
            press" + "the \"" + Labels.ADD_A_BUTTON_TEXT + "\" button.";

        }else{
            final String initialText = "Please paste valid text B here, and then press " + "the \"" + Labels.ADD_B_BUTTON_TEXT + "\" button.";
        }


        newTextArea = new TextArea();
        newTextArea.setText( initialText );
        newTextArea.addClickHandler( new ClickHandler() {
            public void onClick( ClickEvent clickEvent ) {
                // If the text is still the original text, then clear it.
                if ( newTextArea.getText().equals( initialText ) ) {
                    newTextArea.setText( "" );
                }

            }
        });
    }
}

Answer 1

initialText is unresovlable because it is not within the given code block scope.

To fix this, declare intitalText before the if/else statement like so:

protected TextArea getNewTextArea() {
    if ( newTextArea == null ) {

        final String initialText;
        if (isItA){
            initialText = "Please paste valid text A here, and then
            press" + "the \"" + Labels.ADD_A_BUTTON_TEXT + "\" button.";

        }else{
            initialText = "Please paste valid text B here, and then press " + "the \"" + Labels.ADD_B_BUTTON_TEXT + "\" button.";
        }


        newTextArea = new TextArea();
        newTextArea.setText( initialText );
        newTextArea.addClickHandler( new ClickHandler() {
            public void onClick( ClickEvent clickEvent ) {
                // If the text is still the original text, then clear it.
                if ( newTextArea.getText().equals( initialText ) ) {
                    newTextArea.setText( "" );
                }

            }
        } );
    }