Sorry about the no-confidence. In my natural arrogance I tend to assume that if I don't understand someone, it's because they don't understand.
Now that I have a bit more info, I see that's not necessarily the case. Also "beginner" can mean many things to different people - this seems more complex than I'd expect for what
I consider a beginner.
Your idea sounds promising. The question is, what strings will you store in the database, and later retrieve? The names of the variables which hold references to JMenuItems will probably not be very useful to you, but if you use the label text, it should work (provided each label text is unique). Or you could encode the info in a variety of ways - each menu item could correspond to a bit in a long, for example. Store the long in Oracle and read it later to determine which items to enable. Or assign each item an id code, and store the list of id codes. Consider what happens if you ever want to change the label text - old user records won't work correctly anymore. Using codes or bits, you can ensure that the underlying encoding still works even though the displayed text may change.
Object serialization may not be what you'd want here, if each GUI client already has its own JMenuItem objects, and you're just trying to decide which ones to enable. Also if the user can log onto different systems, possibly running different JVMs, then things get thornier. Using the database as the central repository is proabably the correct approach. You'll want to learn about serialization eventually, but perhaps not for this.
[This message has been edited by Jim Yingst (edited February 10, 2000).]
