EE408 Lab 4: Enhancing the First GUI Application


3% (0.5% for each of 1-4, 1% for 5)

Due: 5 PM, Friday September 19.

Note.

new deadline: 5 PM, Monday September 22.


The objective of this lab exercise is to add additional elements to the GUI application we created during this week to make it fuller and closer to be a real application. To ensure that we all start on the same technical basis, my copy of the application will be emailed to you before the lab starts.


1. Menu

Make three top-level menus, from left to right: File Edit                  Help
Rather than next to Edit, Help should be moved to the far right of the menu bar. (How to Use Menus contains instructions on how to do this.)

File menu should contain New, Open ..., Email, and Save as submenus, in this order. Add a separator between Email and Save.
Edit should contain Redo, Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste as submenus, in this order.
Help should contain About ... as a submenu.

Make for New a cascading submenu that contains two menu items of your choice.

Note.

1. Use JMenu, rather than JMenuItem, to create the New menu, because New is a menu, not a menu item.
2. Create a new menu item for Save and Email for popup menu below. Do not reuse the ones created for the menu bar as it will not work.

2. Popup menu

Create a popup menu that contains two menu items: Save and Email. Make this popup menu available on the toolbar, the major panel, and the course panel.
That is, when you right-click the mouse in these areas, the popup menu should appear. This is the standard way in which a popup menu is invoked.

You may want to study this tutorial section first.

Note.

The tutorial shows that in order to pop up a menu on a widget, a MouseListener needs to be registered on the widget. The mouse listener allows us to define responses to different mouse behaviors. In our case, we want to pop up the menu. Therefore, we need to be able to access the popup menu inside the mouse listener.

There can be two ways to achieve this.

(1) Define the mouse listener as an anonymous class. In this way, the popup menu can be accessed directly inside the anonymous class.

(2) Define a normal class, as the example in the tutorial does. Now we need to pass the popup menu to the PopupListener class, which can be done by adding to PopupListener a constructor that takes a JPopupMenu as parameter:

class PopupListener extends MouseAdapter {
private JPopupMenu popup;
public PopupListener(JPopupMenu popup){
          this.popup = popup;
}
// the remainder can be copied from the tutorial.
}

We can then use PopupListener to create and register a MouseListener to any widget W on which we want to be able to popup a menu:

MouseListener popupListener = new PopupListener(popup);
W.addMouseListener(popupListener);

3. Tool Bar

Add New, Open, Save, and Email to toolbar. Each of them must use the icons shown below. They should also exhibit the rollover behavior.



4. Tooltips

Add tooltips to all toolbar buttons and course checkboxes. The tooltip for a toolbar button should explain what the button does, and the tooltip for a course checkbook should give the full title of the particular course.

5. ActionListener for the Email toolbar button

When the Email button is pressed, the name of the selected major and the list of selected courses should be printed on console. A sample output could be

Major: Software Engineering
Selected Courses: EE408, EE363, EE368

This step is a prerequisite to actually emailing the major/course enrollment form, which we will not attempt to implement at this time.

Make sure that the Email menu item also supports this behavior.

Note that an anonymous class may access all variables visible in its enclosing context, but these variables must be constant, which can be declared by adding a final keyword before their declarations.


Demonstrate to me once you are done with these exercises so that I can grade.

Have a good weekend.



Bonus Task (1%+1%)

(1) As shown in the screenshot below, add a personal identity panel to the application, which makes use of 3 new widgets, JComboBox, JLabel, and JTextField. The ComboBox contains three items for ways in which how a person can be addressed - "", "Ms.", and "Mr." The default setting for the ComboBox should be "". Modify the ActionListener to output the names of the person in addition.

Note. Default values for controls are a relevant usability consideration. Bloopers 10 and 11 are about properly setting up defaults for controls.




(2) The three majors, EE, CE, and SE, all have a different list of courses. Try to display different courses in the course panel when the major is changed to a different one.