Getting screen to repaint() before long operation

Question

greetings all,
lately, i've been having a heck of a time getting my JFrame to repaint itself before i start a long operation. In this case, i'm generating a little network traffic. What i'd like to do is be able to update a label on my JFrame so that text is displayed telling the user that a long operation is starting, and then start the operation. However, no attempt i've made so far works. i've tried calling repaint() on multiple objects in a row, i've tried calling repaint() on the same object many times in a row....nothing seems to work.
Can anyone shed some light on this?
peace
...alan lew

Answer 1

I find it very disappointing that Java can;t do a simple task like this. I guess i won;t be including this status message into the app i'm writing at this point. That is, unless someone has a definitive answer that doesn;t involve re-writing code for a simple graphics update.
I, too, had the same problem when I just started out with Swing stuff. I had a status bar that needed updated immediately. I solved it by taking good advantage of Java's multithreading abilities, and ever since then I've never had the problem.
I don't think it comes down to Java not being able to do it, but rather to a fundamental design flaw in your program. If you would have thought about the status problem BEFORE writing it, then the threading stuff would have been no problem. Please don't take that the wrong way, I'm not knocking your program or competence or anything. I'm just saying, that some times when you've never done a particular thing before, then you don't really think about problems like that because you don't know they exist, and therefore when they come up, you're pretty unprepared and it's a pain in the ass.
Granted, it seems like paintImmediately() should work, or at least there should be some way to do that. But, the fact remains that paint() doesn't work and it may come down to you having to rewrite part of your code.
I still have the original code for my program that had the status bar problem. If I can figure anything out, I'll let you know. If you figure out how to do it without threads, post it here.
Good luck,
Jason