JRadioButtons - how do i know which one has been clicked?!

Question

hey all,
im working on a simple gui to implement a ticket office system. im a bit of a newbie to using GUIs and im fed up of trawling through the api's in search of answers and im on the home run... so here's my q...
i have a gui class for doing a search for tickets. i have a controller in a seperate actionListener class for this gui. i have three radio buttons for searching for three different things and then there's a search jbutton to start the search.
how do i know what radio button the user has selected when they click search? i need to be able to know this from the controller, not in the gui itself.
thanks a mil!

Answer 1

import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class TicketOffice_Demo extends JFrame {
    public TicketOffice_Demo() {
        initComponents();
    private void initComponents() {
        ticketsGroup = new ButtonGroup();
        toolbar = new JToolBar();
        startSearch = new JButton();
        typeA = new JRadioButton();
        typeB = new JRadioButton();
        typeC = new JRadioButton();
        scrollpane = new JScrollPane();
        textarea = new JTextArea();
        setDefaultCloseOperation(WindowConstants.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        setTitle("Ticket Office Demo");
        toolbar.setFloatable(false);
        startSearch.setText("Start Search");
        startSearch.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
            public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent evt) {
                startSearchActionPerformed(evt);
        toolbar.add(startSearch);
        ticketsGroup.add(typeA);
        typeA.setSelected(true);
        typeA.setText("\"A\" Tickets");
        typeA.addItemListener(new ItemListener() {
            public void itemStateChanged(ItemEvent evt) {
                typeAItemStateChanged(evt);
        toolbar.add(typeA);
        ticketsGroup.add(typeB);
        typeB.setText("\"B\" Tickets");
        typeB.addItemListener(new ItemListener() {
            public void itemStateChanged(ItemEvent evt) {
                typeAItemStateChanged(evt);
        toolbar.add(typeB);
        ticketsGroup.add(typeC);
        typeC.setText("\"C\" Tickets");
        typeC.addItemListener(new ItemListener() {
            public void itemStateChanged(ItemEvent evt) {
                typeAItemStateChanged(evt);
        toolbar.add(typeC);
        getContentPane().add(toolbar, BorderLayout.NORTH);
        textarea.setBackground(new Color(255, 255, 204));
        textarea.setEditable(false);
        scrollpane.setViewportView(textarea);
        getContentPane().add(scrollpane, BorderLayout.CENTER);
        Dimension screenSize = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize();
        setBounds((screenSize.width-400)/2, (screenSize.height-300)/2, 400, 300);
    private void startSearchActionPerformed(ActionEvent evt) {
        Controller cont = new Controller(ticketType);
        textarea.append("Controller searches for ticket type '"+cont.getTicketType()+"'\n");
    private void typeAItemStateChanged(ItemEvent evt) {
        if(typeA.isSelected()){
            ticketType = "A";
        }else if(typeB.isSelected()){
            ticketType = "B";
        }else if(typeC.isSelected()){
            ticketType = "C";
    public static void main(String args[]) {
        new TicketOffice_Demo().setVisible(true);
    private JButton startSearch;
    private JRadioButton typeA;
    private JRadioButton typeB;
    private JRadioButton typeC;
    private JScrollPane scrollpane;
    private JTextArea textarea;
    private JToolBar toolbar;
    private ButtonGroup ticketsGroup;
    private String ticketType ="A";
class Controller {
    Controller(String ticketType){
        this.ticketType = ticketType;
    public String getTicketType(){
        return ticketType;
    private String ticketType;
}