Java - best practice for getting values from complex dialogs

Question

Hi,
Java is a language I use quite a bit, but much of my work hasn't required GUIs. Now, I'm developing an app which will contain a number of custom-made dialogs (which will obviously extend JDialog). Take a typical Options dialog which typically stores many parameters for a given application.
Simple dialogs that ship with Java allow to 'get' a given value. As they assume that the dialog only consists of obtaining a single piece of data, think JFileChooser.
So, what is the best way to cope with a dialog that could potentially hold hundreds of parameters? It's surely unfeasible to implement getters for each field. I was thinking either creating a hashmap object to hold key-value pairs, and 'get' that from the dialog. Or, I could encapsulate that a little more by creating a new class that manages these values, ProgramOptions or such like. That can be passed around between the dialog and the main app.
I hope this makes sense
TIA

Answer 1

sudman1 wrote:
I doubt it's the most efficient method, but the way I've delt with things like this in the past is to set up the fields in either an Array or ArrayList, then use a for loop that gets the data and drops it into an Array/ArrayList which is then returned.
class MyDialog extends JDialog {
// Global variable
private ArrayList dialogFieldsArray= new ArrayList();
private void initGUI() {
for (int i=0 ; i <numRequiredFields ; i++) {
dialogFieldsArray.add(new JTextField(10));
private ArrayList getDialogData() {
ArrayList rval = new ArrayList();
for (int i=0 ; i < dialogFieldsArray.size() ; i++) {
String tempString = ((JTextField) dialogFieldsArray.get(i)).getText();
rval.add(tempString);
return rval;
The only thing to remember with the above method is the castings involved, but you could implement your own subclasses of ArrayList that deal only with JTextFields and Strings seperately to get around that.
I personally wouldn't go for this exact style, instead I'd opt for a Map collection instead. This because you need to know which field is at which exact index. Imagine you make a form that has the fields: forename, surname, date of birth. And so you know that forename is .get(0) of your ArrayList, etc.
But then, you decide to put a new field, saluation (Mr, Miss, etc) at the beginning. This now shifts all your olds fields along by one, and so you need to edit that code. Sure, no biggie with a handful of fields, but large dialogs could cause headaches.