Fetching coordinates for top left position of top left monitor

Question

I am trying to fetch the coordinates of the top left position in a multimonitor setup for my screen capture program. Here is what I've currently got for the program:

        int dwidth = 0, dheight = 0; //max dimensions of all monitors
    for (GraphicsDevice gd : GraphicsEnvironment
            .getLocalGraphicsEnvironment().getScreenDevices()) {
        if (gd == GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment()
                .getDefaultScreenDevice()) {
            minx = -width; //My attempt at finding the minimum X value did not work
        }
        dwidth += gd.getDisplayMode().getWidth();
        dheight += gd.getDisplayMode().getHeight();
    }

Basically I want to be able to run my program across all of the monitors. For full code view here: https://gist.github.com/fletchto99/5788659

Answer 1

You can get a list of GraphicDevices from the GraphicsEnvironment. Each GraphicsDevice would represent a screen.

Now, you have a number of choices...

You could simply look through the list of GraphicsDevices and simply find the one with the lowest x/y coordinates or you could combine them all into a "virtual screen" and simply extract the top/left coordinates from it.

For example...

public static Rectangle getVirtualScreenBounds() {

    GraphicsEnvironment ge = GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment();
    GraphicsDevice lstGDs[] = ge.getScreenDevices();

    Rectangle bounds = new Rectangle();
    for (GraphicsDevice gd : lstGDs) {

        bounds.add(gd.getDefaultConfiguration().getBounds());

    }

    return bounds;

}

Answer 2

In Java, the coordinate system in the graphic libraries starts at the top-left part of the screen. So your code should always be equivalent to simply stating: 0, 0.