Referencing components on a dynamically created JTabbedPane

Question

My application generates a new JTabbedPane which contains a JTextArea. How do I refer to the text area contained within a tabbed pane at a certain index (need to append text to a generated JTextArea)? Suggestions very much appreciated.
Illustrative code:
handler for adding a new tabbed pane, where tabName is unique for each new pane:
private void jMenuItem2ActionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) {
jTabbedPane1.addTab(tabName , (new javax.swing.JTextArea()));
Psuedocode for what i want to achieve would be jTabbedPane1.tabatindex(2).textarea.addtext("bla")

Answer 1

I have done something very similiar to what you are doing; however, without seeing exactly what is triggering your GUI to add text to the text area's it is hard to give you an exact answer.
Just keep in mind that on all events you should be able to get the source component, which would then let you call the getName method of that component. So if a MouseEvent is the trigger for adding text you can get the name like this:
String compName = ((JComponent) mouseEvent.getSource()).getName()
(assuming you set the name of the component when you instantiated it)
(I have some subclasses that are detected at runtime via reflection, each subclass gets a JCheckBox, there can be 0 or more of these subclasses. I used the getSource/setName/getName methods to determine which checkbox was clicked on even though I don't have a named reference to each one)