Question

Is there a way to restrict this button to only being impressed once? The reason I ask is because for some reasons every time the button is pressed it disrupts the rest of my code. So in effort to save a massive amount of time debugging, it would be much easier to just somehow restrict the number of times it can be pressed. Thanks in advance.

ActionListener pushButton = new buttonPress();
start.addActionListener(pushButton);

Answer 1

To prevent clicking a button you can use JButton.setEnabled(false). So you could do this as the first statement in your ActionListener.

An alternative would be to set a flag in your ActionListener like so:

final ActionListener pushButton = new ActionListener()
{
    private boolean clicked;
    public void actionPerformed(final ActionEvent e)
    {
        if(clicked)
        {
            JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Action already started");
            return;
        }
        clicked = true;
        // ... rest of the action to do ...
    }
}

Note that you should not execute long running tasks in your event handler, see design considerations to keep in mind when implementing event handlers in The Java Tutorials.