Dynamic buttons and itemlisteners????

Question

I'm trying to do something that might not be possible. I would like to create some buttons and actions for those buttons on the fly. For example:
1) read some files from a directory (these file store settings)
2) Create buttons using the filenames as the button labels
3) Create associated actionPerformed section related to those buttons
I want to do this because the amount of files and there names could change all the time. Basically I want to create a button for each file, and essentially launch an application using the settings file as part of a process.
So far I've read a filename into a string. The first problem, how do I use that filename as the name of a button?
JButton "string value" = new JButton();
Then, subsequently, how to you set up the action? See code snipet below.
Hope that made some sense. Can anything like this be done?
Thanks,
James
//this loads the buttons
for (int i=0; i < main.size(); i++)
     Vector temp = new Vector();
     temp = (Vector)main.elementAt(i);
     JButton buttonName = new JButton((String)temp.elementAt(0));
     buttonName.addActionListener(this);
     northFlow.add(buttonName);
//this is in the actionPerformed section
for (int i=0; i < main.size(); i++)
     Vector temp = new Vector();
     temp = (Vector)main.elementAt(i);
     if (source == (String)temp.elementAt(0))
            loadProgram((String)temp.elementAt(0));

Answer 1

There is a way to give a button a variable name equal to the file name but it involves extremely advanced Java programming involving creating dynamic class instances. I would strongly discourage this approach because debugging it when it doesn't work, can be a nightmare.
There is a much easier way to do this however. Create an array of JButtons. Call it, oh say, "MyButtons". Then at the appropriate places, you can do:
JButton[] MyButtons;
MyButtons = new JButton[ main.size ];
for ( int i = 0; i < main.size(); i++ ) {
   Vector temp = new Vector();
   temp = (Vector)main.elementAt(i);
   MyButtons[i] = new JButton( (String)temp.elementAt(0) );
   MyButtons.addAction...
Incidently, you may also want to re-think your data structure. From what I understand, you have an array where each element is a vector (another array of zero or more elements). This results in code that is difficult to read and write. Consider making your own objects instead of using vectors, then you could write something like...
for ( int i = 0; i < main.size(); i++ ) {
   if ( source == main.getProgramName() ) {
loadProgram( main[i].getProgramName() );
The nice thing about this approach is that you can mix and match objects within the array, or add elements to each object in any particular order and it won't break the rest of your code.
P.S., use the square brackets to indicate arrays. For some reason, this board is converting them into angle brackets.