General purpose class (Need some Help)

Question

I have a situation where Id like to have getText() and setText() methods in various components, some of which dont define the method, ie JComboBox, JRadioButton ect.....
Now I know I could subclass the components Id like to add this functionality to but Im trying to make my code as easy to use as possible an really would hat to do this in this case...
Id much rather have a single class which could handle each component through constructors; This too though has some issues which Im not sure I want to deal with. (if youd like more info on my issues with this technique just request) ..
The problem stems from the various ways with wich text would be extracted from the component, JComboBox, getSelected()
JRadioButton

Answer 1

You could define an interface that has these methods. Then you create subclasses that implement this interface for the components JLabel, JRadioButton etc. This way you can refer to every component in the same way; eg. you can have an array of them and call getText() on each of them independent of what components they realy are. Instantiating can be made easier with reflection: you canhave a new class that has a static method that takes the class name and the constructor's parameter list as parametetrs and returns a new obect. A bit like JComponent comp = (JComponent) Class.forName("javax.swing.JLabel").newInstance();
Another possibility is writing a new class that extends JComponent and has a JComponent as a member. In the constructor you define the underlaying component's actual class and then act accordingly in the get/set methods. Like having a general wrapper for any JComponent.