Question

I’m trying to create a custom timer that will record cumulative time passage separated by days. I have a custom JPanel that does all of the timer work for me. I would like to have a GUI interace with this JPanel represented 7 times. However, when I add more than one custom JPanel to either a JPanel or a JFrame, they don’t show up. I’ve tried setting the layout and setting them to everything I can think of, but nothing works.

This is the basic setup of the Panel:

public class TimerPane extends JPanel{
    private static JButton button = new JButton("Start");
    private static JLabel label = new JLabel("Time elapsed:");
    private static JLabel tLabel = new JLabel("0:0:0");
    private static JLabel title = new JLabel("Timer");

    public TimerPane(){
        button.addActionListener(new ButtonListener());

        this.add(title);
        this.add(label);
        this.add(tLabel);
        this.add(button);
        this.setOpaque(false);

        this.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(100,100));
        this.setMaximumSize(new Dimension(100,100));
    }
}

This is my latest attempt at getting the JPanel to display multiple times (just twice here):

public static void main(String[] args){
    JFrame frame = new JFrame("Timer");
    JPanel panel = new JPanel();
    frame.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(700,110));

    panel.setLayout(new BorderLayout());

    panel.add(new TimerPane(), BorderLayout.EAST);
    panel.add(new TimerPane(), BorderLayout.WEST);

    frame.getContentPane().add(panel);


    frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
    frame.pack();
    frame.setVisible(true);
}

The GUI that executes after this is 700×110 of which only 100×100 on the far left is used for exactly one of my TimerPane panels. I have also tried GridLayout on the same code, but then only the TimerPane in the second “spot” shows up. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

First of all, please remove the static from the member variables: button, label, tLabel and title. Otherwise, having them static, it means they are shared by all the TimerPane instances.
You will see 2 timer panels now.

Next, you can change the BorderLayout to a FlowLayout for instance and add several instances of TimerPane.

panel.setLayout(new FlowLayout(FlowLayout.LEFT));

panel.add(new TimerPane());
panel.add(new TimerPane());