Question

I’m using TableLayout for my swing GUI. Initially only some basic labels, buttons and text fields where required which I could later on access by:

public Component getComponent(String componentName) {     return getComponent(componentName, this.frame.getContentPane()); }  private Component getComponent(String componentName, Component component) {     Component found = null;      if (component.getName() != null && component.getName().equals(componentName)) {         found = component;     } else {         for (Component child : ((Container) component).getComponents()) {             found = getComponent(componentName, child);              if (found != null)                 break;         }     }     return found; } 

Unfortunately I ran into issues after using using JScrollPane to support scrolling in JTextArea and JTable’s, which I did with:

JTextArea ta = new JTextArea(); ta.setName('fooburg'); JScrollPane scr = new JScrollPane(ta); frame.getContentPane().add(scr, '1, 1');  // EDIT: changed, tkx bruno 

After suggestions, I’ve been able to access through getComponent('fooburg') the desired component (the version above is the final one). Many thanks to Dan and Bruno!

Answer 1

@bruno is right – you need to add the text pane to the frame’s content pane.

Slightly OT: If you generally want to access every component in a hierarchy, you need something recursive – your current method will only print immediate child names:

void printNames(Component component) {     System.out.println(component.getName());     for (Component child : component.getComponents()) {         printNames(child);     } }  void printFrameNamesComponents(JFrame frame) {     printNames(frame.getContentPane()); } 

(not tested, but something like this.)