Resizing JButtons and other components according to text

Question

How do you resize a JButton at runtime so it adapts to the text given by setSize? I\'ve done some searching and this is the code I\'ve come up with so far. Could th

Answer 1

You need to use setPreferredSize() on the component. Then, to resize it, call setBounds().

I would probably subclass the button, and override the setText(String text) method to include the resizing code.

@Override
public void setText(String arg0) {
    super.setText(arg0);
    FontMetrics metrics = getFontMetrics(getFont()); 
    int width = metrics.stringWidth( getText() );
    int height = metrics.getHeight();
    Dimension newDimension =  new Dimension(width+40,height+10);
    setPreferredSize(newDimension);
    setBounds(new Rectangle(
                   getLocation(), getPreferredSize()));
}

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For testing, I did this in the constructor of my new JButton subclass:

public ResizeToTextButton(String txt){
    super(txt);
    addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
        @Override
        public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent arg0) {
            setText(JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Text"));
        }
    });
}

So, whenever I clicked on the button I could change the text and see if it resized properly.