Implementing back/forward buttons in Swing

Question

I have a quick question.

I\'m getting a little bit of experience with Swing and the easiest way to do this was to draw up a reasonably big GUI.

As part of t

Answer 1

The way I usually do it is as follows:

1. I've got a StepManager class (write it once, use it forever) which handles all logic related to the steps. It got methods like next(), previous(), reset(), isFirst() and isLast().

2. I've then got 'Next' and 'Previous' buttons with appropriate actions (or whatever you choose to use to listen for user interaction).

3. The code related to the 'Next' button calls stepManager.next() to retrieve the index for the next step. Then (when I've got the next step) I simply invoke (another method) showStep(int index) to display the actual step user interface corresponding to the current step index.

Each step is a separate JPanel (Step01, Step02, Step03...).

public void showStep(int index) {
    ContentPanel.removeAll();
    ContentPanel.setLayout(new BorderLayout());

    switch (index) {
        case 0:
            ContentPanel.add(Step01, BorderLayout.CENTER);
            break;

        case 1:
            ContentPanel.add(Step02, BorderLayout.CENTER);
            break;

        case 2:
            ContentPanel.add(Step03, BorderLayout.CENTER);
            break;

        case 3:
            ContentPanel.add(Step04, BorderLayout.CENTER);

        }

    ContentPanel.validate();
    ContentPanel.repaint();
}