JLabel and ImageIcon - Swing

JLabel and ImageIcon

JLabel is Swing’s easiest-to-use component. It creates a label and was introduced in the preceding chapter. Here, we will look at JLabel a bit more closely. JLabel can be used to display text and/or an icon. It is a passive component in that it does not respond to user input. JLabel defines several constructors. Here are three of them:

JLabel(Icon icon) JLabel(String str)

JLabel(String str, Icon icon, int align)

Here, str and icon are the text and icon used for the label. The align argument specifies the horizontal alignment of the text and/or icon within the dimensions of the label. It must be one of the following values: LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER, LEADING, or TRAILING. These constants are defined in the SwingConstants interface, along with several others used by the Swing classes.

Notice that icons are specified by objects of type Icon, which is an interface defined by Swing. The easiest way to obtain an icon is to use the ImageIcon class. ImageIcon implements Icon and encapsulates an image. Thus, an object of type ImageIcon can be passed as an argument to the Icon parameter of JLabel’s constructor. There are several ways to provide the image, including reading it from a file or downloading it from a URL. Here is the ImageIcon constructor used by the example in this section:

ImageIcon(String filename)

It obtains the image in the file named filename.

The icon and text associated with the label can be obtained by the following methods:

Icon getIcon( ) String getText( )

The icon and text associated with a label can be set by these methods:

void setIcon(Icon icon) void setText(String str)

Here, icon and str are the icon and text, respectively. Therefore, using setText( ) it is possible to change the text inside a label during program execution.

The following applet illustrates how to create and display a label containing both an icon and a string. It begins by creating an ImageIcon object for the file hourglass.png, which depicts an hourglass. This is used as the second argument to the JLabel constructor. The first and last arguments for the JLabel constructor are the label text and the alignment. Finally, the label is added to the content pane.

// Demonstrate JLabel and ImageIcon.

import java.awt.*;

import javax.swing.*; /*

<applet code="JLabelDemo" width=250 height=200> </applet>

*/

public class JLabelDemo extends JApplet {

public void init() { try {

SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait( new Runnable() {

public void run() { makeGUI();

}

}

);

} catch (Exception exc) {

System.out.println("Can't create because of " + exc);

}

}

private void makeGUI() {

// Create an icon.

ImageIcon ii = new ImageIcon("hourglass.png");

// Create a label.

JLabel jl = new JLabel("Hourglass", ii, JLabel.CENTER);

// Add the label to the content pane.

add(jl);

}

}

Output from the label example is shown here: