JComboBox - rookie question

[Jay Faluk]

I am writing my first swing pgm, so this may sound ridiculous, but here it is --
i have an employee table, employee number and name being the fields. i want to display the names in a jcombobox, but do the maintenance (edit/create/delete) using the employee number. how do i do this? i.e if the user selects the name, how do i know the corresponding number? is there a standard way of doing this? i have read material, but need to know what the gurus say ;-)
thanks to all in advance.

[Thomas Paul]

The beauty of Swing over AWT. JComboBox takes an object as an item to add to the box. It will run the toString() method of that object to display the object. But when you run the getSelectedItem() you will get back the object. So the trick is to create a class that has all the fields you want (let's say the name and number). Add a toString() method that displays the name. When you get the object back, you can grab the number.

public class CBItem
{
    public String number;
    public String name;
    
    public CBItem(String number, String name) {
        this.number = number;
        this.name = name;
    }
    
    public String toString() {
        return name;
    }
}

Create a bunch of these and either (1) add them one at a time to the JComboBox or (2) put them in an array and pass the array into the constructor of the JComboBox or (3) stick them in a Vector and pass the Vector into the constructor of the JComboBox.

    CBItem[] cbi = new CBItem[5];
    cbi[0] = new CBItem("0", "Zero");
    cbi[1] = new CBItem("1", "One");
    cbi[2] = new CBItem("2", "Two");
    cbi[3] = new CBItem("3", "Three");
    cbi[4] = new CBItem("4", "Four");
    jcb1 = new JComboBox(cbi);

Now when the user clicks on the JComboBox you do this:

CBItem cb = (CBItem)(jcb1.getSelectedItem());
String cbNumber = cb.number;

[Jay Faluk]

this rules! thank you!

[Thomas Paul]

Glad to be of help!