Action advice

Question

Hi everybody,
I'm refactoring an application to deal with Actions, and I've run into a slightly confusing situation. (I would have put this in the Swing forum, but technically it doesn't involve a Swing problem, just a conceptual Actions question.)
I need to create menus on a MenuBar, and thus far, I'm doing it with a for loop, like this:
for( condition ) { create; }The problem with that approach is that it doesn't seem to offer a lot of flexibility. For each menu item, I have a string read in from a file formatted like this:
Item Text=InfoTip=Action=Keyboard Shortcut (where applicable)OK, so after all this rambling, my question is this:
It doesn't appear that you can transfer a string (ie. "Action" in the above string) into a direct function call to an action. The only way I can think of to make this happen is to map strings to actions and check with a lot of if statements, like this:
for( condition )
   // Split string on "="
  // Create menu with array[0]
  // Add infotip from array[1]
// Add shortcut if applicable from array]3]
  // Check all possibilities for action string
  if string is "blah", add this action to the item
  if string is "zz", add a different action to the item
  etc.
}It seems to me that there must be an easier way to add the actions, but I can't think of it. Can anyone give me some ideas, please?
Thanks,
Jezzica85

Answer 1

Create a Map<String, Action> and put pairings of your action strings with their respective action classes before they're used to create your menu items. Something like private final Map<String, Action> actions = new HashMap<String, Action>();
  actions.put("fileopen", new FileOpenAction());
  actions.put("filesave", new FileSaveAction());
} then you can assign action actions.get(array[2]) to the new component in create(), avoiding the if statement.
HTH