2D grid of JComponents (Swing)

Question

I'm trying to make a 2D grid of JTextFields to represent a level map. I've come to the following for initializing the 2D Array of TextFields:

fields = new TextField[level.rows][level.columns];
TextField field;
    for (int r = 0; r < level.rows; r++) {
        for (int c = 0; c < level.columns; c++) {
            field = new TextField(level.bricks[r][c].type);
            fields[r][c] = field;
        }  

Now I have to add them to the JFrame, but they need to be lined up so that every row gets under the other column. I did find GridLayout, however i'm not very experienced with AWT/Swing, and still don't know how achieve the desired layout. I was expecting there to be some kind of method like gLayout.add(JComponent,row,column).

Answer 1

This should work as you explained, here's a fully working example that puts JLabels in the 5x5 Grid:

import java.awt.*;
import javax.swing.*;

public class GridPrb {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    JFrame frame = new JFrame();
    frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);

    Container cp = frame.getContentPane();
    cp.setLayout(new GridLayout(5, 5));

    for(int y = 0; y < 5; y++) {
      for(int x = 0; x < 5; x++) {
        Label l = new Label("x=" + x + ",y=" + y);
        cp.add(l);
      }
    }
    frame.pack();
    frame.setVisible(true);
  }
}

The end result would look something like this:

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

You should be careful about adding order, container is filled column after column in GridLayout.

frame.setLayout( new GridLayout( level.rows, level.columns );

for (int c = 0; c < level.columns; r++) 
    for (int r = 0; r < level.rows; c++) 
         frame.add(fields[r][c]);