Extending component class

Question

Just recently wrote a diary applet that includes all twelve months of the year and thier corresponding days in month panels. The user can cylcle through each year and the panels change accordingly. User can also select and de-select days of the week in any month using left and right mouse clicks respectivley.
The individual months are painted to a Panel object and I use mouselisteners to determine x,y co-ordinates of the pointer to determine which days to colour as selected.
However yesterday I was given a new spec that requires each day selected to "remember" its color, year, month, location and was advised to create each individual day in my own class extending Component, not to use MouseEvents but Action events instead (did I mention I'm restricted to using Java 1.1!).
Could anyone explain what needs to be done to produce a months worth of days as a calendar using a class that extends Component. Cheers.

Answer 1

Each of your days is essentially a toggle/radio button, they can be selected and deselected. Ignore what they look like for now - it's the functionality that's important.
Each day component is responsible for determining whether it's been clicked or not.
Your month panel is then simply a grid of these (perhaps with headers etc.).
Your year display is just a card layout (or tabbed pane or whatever) of various month panels.
Here's an example of how to code up a simple day component:
public class DayComponent extends Component implements MouseListener
  // The date that this component represents
  // Could actually be a Date but we'll keep it simple for now
  private int day;
  // Whether this day is selected
  private boolean selected;
  public DayComponent(int day)
    this.day = day;
    selected = false;
    // This component listens for mouse events over itself
    addMouseListener(this);
  public void setSelected(boolean selected)
    this.selected = selected;
    repaint(); // Causes this component to update its background
  public boolean isSelected()
    return selected;
  public Dimension getPreferredSize()
    return new Dimension(20, 20); // Or something
  public void paint(Graphics g)
    g.setColor(selected?Color.lightGray:Color.yellow); // For example
    g.fillRect(0, 0, getSize().width, getSize().height);
    g.setColor(Color.black);
    g.drawString(String.valueOf(day), 10, 10); // Work out the position properly...
  public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent e)
  public void mouseExired(MouseEvent e)
  public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e)
  public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent e)
  public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e)
    // Toggle the selection state of this button when the mouse is clicked
    setSelected(!selected);
}That's really all there is to it. Storing the state of the buttons to the hard drive or somewhere else is a different matter.
If you think about what this is doing, it's basically just a radio button so you might find it neater to actually extend something like Button, JButton, JToggleButton etc. to get even more advanced behaviour. This is certainly worth doing eventually since you'll want to avoid writing layout and painting code if you can help it ('cos it can get messy).
Hope this helps.