Action listeners and while loops

Question

Hi. I have a while loop, that runs for some condition
in this loop, i'm adding as many buttons as the condition holds.
for each loop, i adds an action listener.
the problem is when i want to use the action listener. it, of corse, respond to the last button in the loop. how can i make all the buttons work? i dont know ho many loops there will be, ergo i don't know how many buttons there will be...
read from file
while (file is not empty)
ImageButton = new ImageIcon (name from file);
theButton = new JButton(imageButton);
myPanel.add(theButton);
theButton.addActionListener(this);
buttonId = i++;
in the action listener
if (listener = theButton)
//do something

Answer 1

of corse it would only respond to the last button added, thats what you told it to do. In your while loop you assign the variable "theButton" to be a new JButton. Since "theButton" in reassigned with each iteration of your loop, it will always point to the last button you created. So, in your actionListener when you check if (listener = theButton) it will only know about the last button you added. You will need to find some other way of determining which button was pressed. One possible solution would be to have a unique actionListener for each button. Another option might be to cast the source of the action to a JButton. i.e.
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)  {
     if (e.getSource() instanceof JButton) {
          //do something
}