Read from server and display in external frame

Question

Hello everyone,
I am using Eclipse, My project consist of server and client connected through a socket. When I connect to the server, i am getting lots of data from the server and it takes a bit of time, so I was thinking while the user wait for the data, i will pop up a frame with a text area displaying the data that the client is recieving at the moment.
Basiclly, instead of just displaying the data recieved in the console (readline) i would like to display it in an external frame.
something like this:
JEditorPane textArea = new JEditorPane("text/html", "Getting All IDs");
JScrollPane scroller = new JScrollPane(textArea,
JScrollPane.VERTICAL_SCROLLBAR_AS_NEEDED,
     JScrollPane. HORIZONTAL_SCROLLBAR_AS_NEEDED);
JOptionPane optPane = new JOptionPane(scroller,
     JOptionPane.OK_OPTION);
JDialog d = optPane.createDialog(null, "Data Receiving:");
myClient.readMsg(data);
scroller.add(data, textArea);
Please help.
thx

Answer 1

Hello,
if you not receive HTML-pages or HTML-formatted text, i suggest to use JTextPane instead of JEditorPane, as formatting color and font seems to be a little bit easier to do.
Next, i recommend to define a litte interface, ..
public interface DataReceivedListener {
  void dataReceived(String line);
}.. which then is implemented by the class the JTextPane is embedded into:
public class MainFrame extends JFrame implements DataReceivedListener {
  private JTextPane textPane;
  private StyledDocument doc;
  private Style defaultStyle;
  public void dataReceived(String line) {
    if (!line.equals(DataServer.EOF)) {
      try {
        doc.insertString(doc.getLength(), line + "\n", defaultStyle);
      } catch (BadLocationException ble) { ble.printStackTrace(); }
}Within the constructor of that main class you instantiate the style used for the received data lines and then pass this main class itself to the constructor of your server class:
public MainFrame() {
  doc = textPane.getStyledDocument();
  defaultStyle = doc.getStyle("default");
  DataServer server = new DataServer(this);
}The server class stores the listener, and when the server receives lines they will be forwarded to the main frame class:
public class DataServer implements Runnable {
  DataReceivedListener listener;
  public DataServer(DataReceivedListener listener) {
    this.listener = listener;
  public void run() {
    while (null != (line = instream.readLine())) {
      listener.dataReceived(line);
}You can easily change the line foreground color in dataReceived(String) by deriving other styles from defaultStyle:
Style redForeground = doc.addStyle("red", defaultStyle);
StyleConstants.setForeground(redForeground, Color.RED);
Style blueForeground = doc.addStyle("blue", defaultStyle);
StyleConstants.setForeground(blueForeground, Color.BLUE);This way you can switch the foreground color by passing the appropriate style to the text inserting method (see above):
currentForeground = currentForeground == redForeground ? blueForeground : redForeground;
doc.insertString(doc.getLength(), line + "\n", currentForeground);I could post an complete example of that, but i try to be short and hope this posting will help...