Introducing JavaFX Menus

CHAPTER 36  

Introducing JavaFX Menus

Menus are an important part of many GUIs because they give the user access to a program’s core functionally. Furthermore, the proper implementation of an application’s menus is a necessary part of creating a successful GUI. Because of the key role they play in many applications, JavaFX provides extensive support for menus. Fortunately, JavaFX’s approach to menus is both powerful and streamlined.

As you will see throughout the course of this chapter, JavaFX menus have several parallels with Swing menus, which were described in Chapter 33. As a result, if you already know how to create Swing menus, learning how to create menus in JavaFX is easy. That said, there are also several differences, so it is important not to jump to conclusions about the JavaFX menu system.

The JavaFX menu system supports several key elements, including

        The menu bar, which is the main menu for an application.

        The standard menu, which can contain either items to be selected or other menus (submenus).

        The context menu, which is often activated by right-clicking the mouse. Context menus are also called popup menus.

JavaFX menus also support accelerator keys, which enable menu items to be selected without having to activate the menu, and mnemonics, which allow a menu item to be selected by the keyboard once the menu options are displayed. In addition to “normal” menus, JavaFX also supports the toolbar, which provides rapid access to program functionality, often paralleling menu items.

Menu Basics

The JavaFX menu system is supported by a group of related classes packaged in javafx.scene.control. The ones used in this chapter are shown in Table 36-1, and they represent the core of the menu system. Although JavaFX allows a high degree of

customization if desired, normally you will simply use the menu classes as-is because their default look and feel is generally what you will want.

Here is brief overview of how the classes fit together. To create a main menu for an application, you first need an instance of MenuBar. This class is, loosely speaking, a container for menus. To the MenuBar you add instances of Menu. Each Menu object defines a menu. That is, each Menu object contains one or more selectable items. The items displayed by a Menu are objects of type MenuItem. Thus, a MenuItem defines a selection that can be chosen by the user.

In addition to “standard” menu items, you can also include check and radio menu items in a menu. Their operation parallels check box and radio button controls. A check menu item is created by CheckMenuItem. A radio menu item is created by RadioMenuItem. Both of these classes extend MenuItem.

SeparatorMenuItem is a convenience class that creates a separator line in a menu. It inherits CustomMenuItem, which is a class that facilitates embedding other types of controls in a menu item. CustomMenuItem extends MenuItem.

One key point about JavaFX menus is that MenuItem does not inherit Node. Thus, instances of MenuItem can only be used in a menu. They cannot be otherwise incorporated into a scene graph. However, MenuBar does inherit Node, which does allow the menu bar to be added to the scene graph.

Another key point is that MenuItem is a superclass of Menu. This allows the creation of submenus, which are, essentially, menus within menus. To create a submenu, you first create and populate a Menu object with MenuItems and then add it to another Menu object. You will see this process in action in the examples that follow.

When a menu item is selected, an action event is generated. The text associated with the selection will be the name of the selection. Thus, when using one action event handler to process all menu selections, one way you can determine which item was selected is by examining the name. Of course, you can also use separate anonymous inner classes or lambda expressions to handle each menu item’s action events. In this case, the menu selection is already known and there is no need to examine the name to determine which item was selected.

As an alternative or adjunct to menus that descend from the menu bar, you can also create stand-alone, context menus, which pop up when activated. To create a context menu, first create an object of type ContextMenu. Then, add MenuItems to it. A context menu is often activated by clicking the right mouse button when the mouse is over a control for which a context menu has been defined. It is important to point out that ContextMenu is not derived from MenuItem. Rather, it inherits PopupControl.

A feature related to the menu is the toolbar. In JavaFX, toolbars are supported by the ToolBar class. It creates a stand-alone component that is often used to provide fast access to functionality contained within the menus of the application. For example, a toolbar might provide fast access to the formatting commands supported by a word processor.