Choosing a layout manager for card simulation

[ric hill]

I want to create a program that will help me remember new vocabulary by showing a word in English and letting me guess the foriegn language equivalent.
At the moment I use paper cards for this. The English word is one one side of a card, the foreign word is on the other.


I have a WordCard object

WordCard
String EnglishWord
String ForeignWord
Integer ID
Integer Array GuessHistory []



I imagine the WordsCardGUI will display as follows

WordCardGUI
JLabel = EnglishWord
JTextField = ForeignWord
JButton = "Try" this.compare()
JButton = "ShowAnswer" this.reveal ()



MainInterface GUI
(not sure what this needs to do yet, any ideas would be great)
GetNewCards()
GetIncorrectGuessedCards()



My question is.


Which display layout is best for this task?
I would like to be able to view up to 7 cards on screen at once.
I know there is a cardlayout manager but is this the best suited one to use? My intution tends towards each card in a seperate panel.

[Joel McNary]

From the sound of it, I think you want a Flow Layout containing 7 different JPanels, each of which has a Card layout. Each card layout contains 2 cards: The Foreign card and the English card. (Probably this is 7 instances of a specific class that extends JPanel, since all that's different is the data...)

Anyway, I think this is best suited to our Swing forum, so I'm moving it there.

[ric hill]

this program will dislay two cards, I understand most of it apart from the line

 
public void addComponentToPane(Container pane) {
 

Does the container pane begin exist only here? Shouldnt it be declared and initialised first?

 
 
 // GUI to display the cards, will have  two cards in 1 panel. 
 
 import java.awt.*;
 import java.awt.event.*;
 import javax.swing.*;
 
 public class cardGUI implements ItemListener {
 
 
 
 
 JPanel cards; //a panel that uses CardLayout
 final static String ENGLISHPANEL = "JPanel with English";
 final static String OTHERLPANEL = "JPanel with OtherL";
    
// set up the cards in a content pane.. is this where pane is created
 
public void addComponentToPane(Container pane) {
        //Put the JComboBox in a JPanel to get a nicer look.
        JPanel comboBoxPane = new JPanel(); //use FlowLayout
        String comboBoxItems[] = { ENGLISHPANEL, OTHERLPANEL };
        JComboBox cb = new JComboBox(comboBoxItems);
        cb.setEditable(false);
        cb.addItemListener(this);
        comboBoxPane.add(cb);
 
        //Create the "cards".
        JPanel card1 = new JPanel();
        card1.add(new JButton("Try"));
        card1.add(new JButton("Next"));
        card1.add(new JTextField("TextField", 20));
 
        JPanel card2 = new JPanel();
        card2.add(new JLabel("English Word"));
 
        //Create the panel that contains the "cards".
        cards = new JPanel(new CardLayout());
        cards.add(card1, ENGLISHPANEL);
        
        cards.add(card2, OTHERLPANEL   );
 
        pane.add(comboBoxPane, BorderLayout.PAGE_START);
        pane.add(cards, BorderLayout.CENTER);


    }
 

 

 

 public void itemStateChanged(ItemEvent evt) {
        CardLayout cl = (CardLayout)(cards.getLayout());
        cl.show(cards, (String)evt.getItem());
    }
 
    
 
    
     /**
     * Create the GUI and show it.  For thread safety,
     * this method should be invoked from the
     * event-dispatching thread.
     */
    private static void createAndShowcardGUI() {
        //Make sure we have nice window decorations.
        JFrame.setDefaultLookAndFeelDecorated(true);
 
        //Create and set up the window.
        JFrame frame = new JFrame("Card GUI");
        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
 
        //Create and set up the content pane.
        cardGUI demo = new cardGUI();
        demo.addComponentToPane(frame.getContentPane());
 
        //Display the window.
        frame.pack();
        frame.setVisible(true);
    } 
 
     public static void main(String[] args) {
        //Schedule a job for the event-dispatching thread:
        //creating and showing this application's GUI.
        javax.swing.SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                createAndShowcardGUI();
            }
        });
    }
 
 }