Series of JDialog boxes

Question

Hi everyone,
While installing any software we usually come across a series of dialog boxes with 'Back'
and 'Next' buttons; I have to do something similar in our project. I am generating a series of dialog boxes without any problem using JDialog in Swing. But the problem is
When the user enters some values in first dialog box and clicks 'Next' button and goes to the
second dialog box and then comes back to the first dialog box using the 'Back' button in the second dialog box, I have to display the first dialog box with those values which the user entered previously so that he need not enter them again. How to do this?
Thanks in advance. (I actually did it successfully by using event handling, but is there a better way of doing it like writing the values entered by the user into some text file and then retrieving them from the text file while displaying the dialog box?)

Answer 1

Here's one way. Your dialog class should implement an interface such as
public interface InputPage
public void takeState (Hashtable ht);
public void giveState (Hashtable ht);
A "director" class maintains the sequence of InputPage implementations
and listens for "next" and "back" events. When a page comes into view,
that director invokes takeState(); and when a page goes out of view, the
director invokes giveState(). In this way, the pages propogate the data
back and forth.