Cards

[Lesole Mphinyane]

how do i model a card deck so that when a button "remove" is pressed, a card is removed from the top of the deck and when the button "return" is pressed, the removed card is retuned to the bottom of the deck and the card face being displayed on the GUI interface... Please help

[Paul Sturrock]

Sounds like you are looking for a CardLayout.

(Also, this is not an advanced question, so I'll move it to a more appropriate forum)

[Craig Wood]

how do i model a card deck so that when a button "remove" is pressed, a card is removed
from the top of the deck and when the button "return" is pressed, the removed card is
retuned to the bottom of the deck
Keep your cards in either an array or a Collection such as ArrayList. Collections have
helpful methods for things like shuffeling and adding/removing elements. One drawback is
having to deal with generics (j2se 1.5+). With arrays you have to do more work.
Let's say we have the cards stored in an array and that the deck has 52 cards. Then decide
if the "top" of the deck is the last card in the array (index 51) or the first card(index 0).
These are arbitrary design decisions that you get to make; you can always go back and
change them if you decide on a better way.
If the cards are face–down and the last card is at index 51 then to remove the top card
might be Card topCard = cards[51]. To put this card on the bottom of this deck loop
through the array, shift all cards in the range of index 0 to index 50 up one index [1 - 51].
Then assign topCard to index 0 in the array. Or you can use the System.arraycopy
method to copy the cards into a new array at the "new indices", assign the topCard to
index 0 and assign the cards array reference the value of the temp/copied array.
By contrast, the ArrayList api has methods to remove and add objects at any index in the
collection - easy.
and the card face being displayed on the GUI interface
Depends on how you want to put your gui together. You can draw the card images on a JPanel
in the paintComponent method with drawImage(images[n], x, y, this) or you can
use JLabels (set in a layout) to show the images, changing the images with
label.setIcon(new ImageIcon(images[n])).
edit: formatting
[ March 26, 2007: Message edited by: Craig Wood ]