Displaying Gifs

Question

Hello all!
I'll get right into my problem. I'm using netbeans 5.0 to do some Java at home along with my course at college. I'm currently working on an applet but am having some problems getting images to display, can anyone explain why I get the error:
"symbol : variable mygif1
location: class applet.SimpleApplet
g.drawImage(mygif1,20,20,this);
1 error"
When I compile the following:
import java.awt.Graphics;
import java.awt.Color;
import java.net.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.applet.*;
import java.net.URL.*;
public class SimpleApplet extends Applet{
    public void init() {
        URL base;
        Image mygif1;
        setBackground(Color.white);
        mygif1 = getImage(base,"Bumpo.gif");
    public void paint(Graphics g){
        g.drawImage(mygif1,20,20,this);
}Can anyone suggest why? I'm sure I have the file i refer to in the correct directory. Thanks in advance.
Message was edited by:
Glomp

Answer 1

The problem isn't with the reference to the gif file. It's that mygif1 is a local variable in your init method, which means that it's not accessible in your paint method.
The solution is pretty simple. Make mygif1 a field of the class. Set its value in init, but don't declare it there.
It's usually a bad thing to use fields to pass values between methods, but in a case like this the image really is part of the state of the object.