Example text in JTextField

Question

I am looking for a way to put example text into a swing JTextField and have it grayed out. The example text should then disappear as soon as any thing is entered into that text field. Some what similar to what stackoverflow does when a user is posting a question with the title field.

I would like it if it was already a extended implementation of JTextField so that I can just drop it in as a simple replacement. Anything from swingx would work. I guess if there is not an easy way to do this my option will probably be to override the paint method of JTextField do something that way maybe.

Thanks

Answer 1

The Text Prompt class provides the required functionality without using a custom JTextField.

It allows you to specify a prompt that is displayed when the text field is empty. As soon as you type text the prompt is removed.

The prompt is actually a JLabel so you can customize the font, foreground etc..:

JTextField tf7 = new JTextField(10);
TextPrompt tp7 = new TextPrompt("First Name", tf7);
tp7.setForeground( Color.RED );

Answer 2

If you can use external librairies, the Swing components from Jide software have what you are looking for; it's called LabeledTextField (javadoc) and it's part of the JIDE Common Layer (Open Source Project) - which is free. It's doing what mklhmnn suggested.