Disable all components AND subcomponents

Question

I have a bunch of JButtons, JText, JTree, etc. in a JPanel and I want to disable/grey-out all of them. But some of the JComponents are in a Box. They don't get disabled. The code I am using now:
     public void setEditable(boolean bool) {
          for (Component component: getComponents()) {
               component.setEnabled(bool);
So the above works for all the components that are not in the Box
I ended up doing the below (checks if the component is a Box and if it is, iterate through that enabling/disableing JComponents):
     public void setEditable(boolean bool) {
          for (Component component: getComponents()) {
               component.setEnabled(bool);
               if (component.getClass().toString().equals("class javax.swing.Box")) {
                    for(Component subComponent: ((Box)component).getComponents()) {
                         subComponent.setEnabled(bool);
So big question is, is there some better way of doing this, or someway which is more generic?

Answer 1

Well you could extend Box and override the setEnabled method to call setEnabled of all it's components, and then use that as your Box instead.
But I have a couple of suggestions regarding the code you posted.
1. You should use instanceof operator to check whether the component is an instance of Box
2. You don't handle the case when there's a Box within a Box.
e.g.,
public void setEditable(boolean editable) {
    for (Component c : getComponents()) {
        setEditable(c, editable);
private void setEditable(Component c, boolean editable) {
    c.setEnabled(editable);
    if (c instanceof javax.swing.Box) {
        for (Component subC : ((javax.swing.Box)c).getComponents())
            setEditable(subC, editable);
}