Trying to access objects set in main()

Question

I apologize that my subject may not be very clear, but I'm not entirely certain how to describe the problem in one line.
I am working on a program that will eventually read customer information from a file, display it in a GUI and allow edits to be written to the file. I am working on the portion right now which should allow me to use a stub program to set values, then display them in the GUI. I will work on the file IO portion after I have this problem solved. However, my GUI class cannot find the object I created in the stub program. I suspect it's because it's local to main(), but I'm not sure how else to approach it. Here are the relevant portions of my three classes (Customer, View, and Test). The compilation error message I receive is that it cannot resolve symbol 'customer' in this line in the View class:
customerIDField = new JTextField(customer.getCustomerID()); public class Customer {
     private int customerID;
     public Customer() {
     public int getCustomerID() {
          return customerID;
     public void setCustomerID(int customerID) {
          this.customerID = customerID;
public class Test {
     public static void main(String[] args) {
          Customer customer = new Customer();
          customer.setCustomerID(1);
          AccountView app = new AccountView();
public class View extends JFrame{
     private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
     private BorderLayout layout;
     private JTextField customerIDField;
     public View() {
          super("View");
          layout = new BorderLayout(5,5);
          Container c = getContentPane();
          c.setLayout(layout);
          customerIDField = new JTextField(customer.getCustomerID());
          c.add(customerIDField, BorderLayout.NORTH);
          setSize(300, 200);
          setVisible(true);
}I'm sure that I'm just panicking and thinking about it wrong, so any shove in the right direction would be great. Thank you!

Answer 1

It turns out, I did use an ArrayList. I knew I didn't actually want an array for the exact reason you mentioned.
For awhile, I was stuck because I couldn't figure out how to access the Customer methods from the customer stored in my list. Finally, I realized that I could (and hopefully should) create a new Customer in my View class and use it to store a customer temporarily for display purposes. I imagine that I'll keep this temporary customer around for editing, then plug him back into the appropriate slot in the ArrayList to overwrite what was there before.
Sorry if I'm getting a little long-winded, but I'm excited because I'm finally starting to feel smart about this stuff. I come from a VB.net background, and although I've only got about a year of experience there, it's a bit difficult for me to switch to the Java mindset. But the state hired me as a Java developer, so a Java developer I shall be.
Thanks again for all of your help and encouragement!! Have a happy Wednesday!