disabling and enabling MenuItems

[daiyen]

Hey there folks!

I need some help from you. I'm currently trying to refresh my memories of Java, thus I've decided to make a program using all my knowledge:) So far I've made a menubar, which contains some MenuItems in submenus, all of which are listened by the actionlistener interface. My problem is the following: I'd like to be able to use setEnabled() on each of my MenuItems after I've created them. I've tried to retrieve the Object that fires the event via actionevent, but apparently that's not the way I should have tried it. Any idea about where I should search for the answer?

Any help is appreciated!

[pbrockway2]

If want to do anything with the menu item after you have created it (like call setEnabled()) you will need to keep a reference to the item.

The Action interface provides a nice abstraction for this sort of thing. The idea behind it is that it is the action rather than any particular widget that is enabled or has properties like a description or mnemonic keys etc.

Construct the menu item using the constructor that takes an Action argument. You can then disable the action at any later time by using its setEnabled() method. But again you have to keep a reference to the action that you create.

[daiyen]

You're right and thank you for the help:) Although I forgot to mention the apparently important detail, that I'm using AWT rather than Swing, so I'm using MenuItem in stead of JMenuItem, which differs MenuItem in their constructors :( Is that possible that there's no way to solve this? I think I'm missing something very obvious, I'm just not sure what it is:)