JScrollPane based component

Question

Hi all,
There's a common feature in office applications (including MS Excel) where a user can load in a text file which has been layed out with fixed width columns (not delimited, actually set out with X characters until next column).
The interface used by these applications is one where a use can click to create, and hold to drag column lines around to show how a lump of text is to be split into columns.
I'm trying to create a component like this, but I'm having real troubles with it!
I'm thinking it should be based on a JScrollPane which contains a JTextArea (containing the text and also some custom painting method for the vertical lines) and a JLabel (or something) that has custom painting and event handling for displaying and moving columns around (an inverted triangle I guess).
The JLabel will have to be as wide as the JTextArea, which itself needs to be as wide as the long line of text it contains.
I haven't even got so far as to produce an useful code to post here yet, as my experimenting has failed completely at the prototype stage! I'm even having trouble getting anything to show inside a JScrollPane when not supplying the component in the constructor!
I can do the dragging/painting/lines/columns nonsense myself once I have something to work from, but I'm desperate to work out a solution for simply displaying the scrollpane/ textarea-wide-enough-for-displaying-its-own-text / JLabel-same-width-as-textarea combination!
Can anyone help?

Answer 1

you may try this:
import java.awt.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class Testing extends javax.swing.JFrame {
     private JScrollPane jScrollPane1;
     private JLabel jLabel1;
     private JTextArea jTextArea1;
     public static void main(String[] args) {
          Testing inst = new Testing();
          inst.setVisible(true);
     public Testing() {
          super();
          initGUI();
     private void initGUI() {
          try {
               GridLayout thisLayout = new GridLayout(2, 1);
               this.getContentPane().setLayout(thisLayout);
               setDefaultCloseOperation(WindowConstants.DISPOSE_ON_CLOSE);
                    jScrollPane1 = new JScrollPane();
                    this.getContentPane().add(jScrollPane1);
                    jScrollPane1.setHorizontalScrollBarPolicy(JScrollPane.HORIZONTAL_SCROLLBAR_ALWAYS);
                    jScrollPane1.setVerticalScrollBarPolicy(JScrollPane.VERTICAL_SCROLLBAR_ALWAYS);
                         jTextArea1 = new JTextArea();
                         jScrollPane1.setViewportView(jTextArea1);
                    jLabel1 = new JLabel();
                    this.getContentPane().add(jLabel1);
                    jLabel1.setText("Label");
               pack();
               setSize(300, 200);
          } catch (Exception e) {
               e.printStackTrace();
}