Trying to create multiple JLabels, however only one is appearing

Question

I am trying to create multiple JLabels of the same form and then trying to add them to the same JPanel. However, only one of the JLabels appears and I can\'t figure out why!

Answer 1

You can not use BorderLayout for that, because that layout has only room for 5 components: BorderLayout.CENTER, BorderLayout.NORTH, BorderLayout.WEST, BorderLayout.SOUTH, BorderLayout.EAST.

Solution with one of the built in layouts:

I would suggest using a FlowLayout or a GridLayout, depending on what you want. You can still use BorderLayout as outer panel, but just introduce an inner panel with one of the above mentioned layouts.

So with a GridLayout, you would wrap your labels in a grid layout and then put this one in your border layout. Your code would look like this:

panel.setLayout(new BorderLayout());
final JPanel upperPanel = new JPanel(); 
panel.add(upperPanel, BorderLayout.NORTH); // add some stuff in the north

final JPanel innerPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,0));
JLabel[] dashedLineLabel = new JLabel[wordLength];
for (int i = 0; i < wordLength; i++) {   
    dashedLineLabel[i] = new JLabel("__  ");
    dashedLineLabel[i].setFont(new Font("Serif", Font.BOLD, 30));
    innerPanel.add(dashedLineLabel[i]);
} 

panel.add(innerPanel, BorderLayout.CENTER);

Solution with MigLayout:

If you don't want to choose between different layouts, you can also use MigLayout, which is a 3rd party layout manager, that basically gives you all the options in one manager. And you will have a lot cleaner code (imho). The disadvantage is of course that you have to use an external jar file as dependency. (By the way: Since I found out about MigLayout, I have never used another layout manager again.)

With MigLayout:

final JPanel labelPanel = new JPanel(new MigLayout("", "", "")); 
panel.add(labelPanel, "north");

JLabel[] dashedLineLabel = new JLabel[wordLength];
for (int i = 0; i < wordLength; i++) {   
    dashedLineLabel[i] = new JLabel("__  ");
    dashedLineLabel[i].setFont(new Font("Serif", Font.BOLD, 30));
    panel.add(dashedLineLabel[i], "wrap");
}