Adding Beans

We will now add the components (beans) that make up our little example applet. Looking at the proposed GUI we see that we will need

• 3 labels,
• 3 text fields,
• 4 buttons.

The right part of the window (the tools area) contains three panels that we will need in the following:

• the palette window that shows all beans we can use,
• the inspector window with a hierarchical view of the beans that have been added to the form (i.e. to the graphical area represented by the grey rectangle),
• the properties window displaying the properties of the selected bean.

1. First resize the tools area:
   • move the mouse over the large horizontal border directly above the inspector window, the cursor now changes to a double arrow (),
   • drag the border down and enlarge the palette window until you can see two lines of icons,
   • enlarge the inspector window in a similar way, using the border right below it, until all three windows have approximately the same height,
   • drag the vertical border to the left until it almost reaches the form rectangle to make the whole tools area as wide as possible.
2. Change the global layout of the applet from BorderLayout to Null Layout:
   • Locate the JApplet entry () in the inspector, open its context menu with a right click and select Set Layout/Null Layout.

   This allows to place all components directly with the mouse.

3. Make sure that you are in selection mode:
   • If the arrow field in the upper left corner of the form window is dark grey (): fine.
   • If not: simply click on it.
4. Now add the labels to the form:
   • Find the JLabel bean () in the palette and click on it.
   • Click in the grey form rectangle at approximately the position where the label should be. It is shown immediately with the default text jLabel1. Additionally it is displayed in the inspector window.
   • Repeat the last two steps twice to add the other labels
   • If you like, you can rearrange the labels by dragging them to their correct positions.
5. Finally add the three text fields (JTextField ) and the four buttons (JButton ).

If you have added a wrong bean, you can delete it by choosing Delete from its context menu, either directly in the form area or from the inspector.

The result should look like similar to this: