Serializing a JPanel

Question

Hi,
I am trying to serialize a JPanel and then open it again. My JPanel (called rightPanel) contains a JButton, which has some text set to "xyz". Would I have to serialize the JPanel and JButton separately? Or if I serialize the JPanel, would that take care of the JButton too?
At the moment my code is like this:
JFileChooser myFileChooser = new JFileChooser ();
myFileChooser.showSaveDialog(MyFrame.this);
File myFile = myFileChooser.getSelectedFile();
try{
FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(myFile);
ObjectOutputStream s = new ObjectOutputStream(out);
s.writeObject(rightPanel);
s.flush
} catch (IOException e) {};
When I execute my Save, a file is saved onto my system. I do not know if the saved file contains my rightPanel.
When I try to open up the file (by doing a readObject), nothing happens. What am I doing wrong?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks.
AU

Answer 1

You make some very good points there. I do totally agree with you that serializing Swing components is discouraged.
But you see the reason I am trying to serialize my JPanel is because of this. Say the components on my JPanel will be determined on-the-fly by clicking on buttons on my JToolbar. So that means on one occasion a user might add to my JPanel a JButton, followed by 20 JLabels, all of different sizes. On the next occasion my JPanel might contain a 100 JButtons, a few jpeg images, and a textbox. Are you suggesting I should use something like a Vector to store everything that is added to my JPanel, and that everytime I add an item to it, I also add it to the Vector...and then when I want to Save my JPanel, I traverse through my Vector, serializing the attributes of every object in my Vector.
That makes more code for me!!!
AU