Adding items to a JComboBox

Question

I use a combo box on panel and as I know we can add items with the text only

    comboBox.addItem('item text'); 

But some times I need to use some value of the item and item text like in html select:

    <select><option value="item_value">Item Text</option></select> 

Is there any way to set both value and title in combo box item?

For now I use a hash to solve this issue.

Answer 1

Wrap the values in a class and override the toString() method.

class ComboItem {     private String key;     private String value;      public ComboItem(String key, String value)     {         this.key = key;         this.value = value;     }      @Override     public String toString()     {         return key;     }      public String getKey()     {         return key;     }      public String getValue()     {         return value;     } } 

Add the ComboItem to your comboBox.

comboBox.addItem(new ComboItem("Visible String 1", "Value 1")); comboBox.addItem(new ComboItem("Visible String 2", "Value 2")); comboBox.addItem(new ComboItem("Visible String 3", "Value 3")); 

Whenever you get the selected item.

Object item = comboBox.getSelectedItem(); String value = ((ComboItem)item).getValue(); 

Answer 2

You can use any Object as an item. In that object you can have several fields you need. In your case the value field. You have to override the toString() method to represent the text. In your case "item text". See the example:

public class AnyObject {      private String value;     private String text;      public AnyObject(String value, String text) {         this.value = value;         this.text = text;     }  ...      @Override     public String toString() {         return text;     } }  comboBox.addItem(new AnyObject("item_value", "item text"));