Wizard dialogs are ubiquitous in today's desktop applications. This article creates a framework for a simple wizard dialog, complete with Back, Next, and Cancel buttons that you can extend for use in your applications as necessary.
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Wizard dialogs are ubiquitous in today's desktop applications. What exactly is a wizard dialog? Well, you've likely run across several wizard dialogs already, either when you're installing a pre-packaged application, or you're configuring a series of program options. In this article, I will create a framework for a simple wizard dialog that you can extend as necessary.
A wizard dialog is constructed with a number of panels, and each panel contains user-configurable components such as radio buttons, sliders, or text fields. The idea here is that the application user, by pressing either the Next or Back buttons, can "flip" across these panels, entering information on each one until he or she completes the path. At this point, the Next button often changes to a Finish button, and when pressed, the dialog will close. The instantiating class should then be able to retrieve all of the data that was entered. At any time, the user can also press the Cancel button to quit the dialog and discard any data that has been entered so far.
Seems like a simple design, right? Well, not necessarily. Here are a few design considerations that must be kept in mind.
First, note that wizard dialogs do not necessarily traverse across their panels in a linear fashion. In other words, if a wizard dialog has Panels 1 through 5, pressing the Next button four times may take you from Panel 1 to Panel 5, traversing across Panels 2, 3, and 4. But that's not always the case. For example, what happens if Panel 3 tries to connect to a remote server and cannot make the connection? In that case, the wizard may need to branch off to another series of panels which takes the user through a setup without connecting to the server. And when you add several possible such branches into the equation, you begin to see that wizard panels must be connected in a tree-like fashion, where you start at the beginning (the trunk) and move your way down branches until you reach a terminable leaf, at which point the Next button should change to a Finish and the wizard dialog ends.
Second, the Next and Back (and even sometimes the Cancel) buttons may need to be disabled. At the initial panel, the Back button should always be disabled - after all, there's no previous panel to go back to. However, there are other cases where the Next button should be disabled. Validating user entry is the traditional example of this. Let's say that a panel is asking a user to enter their password twice using two Swing JPasswordField components. (This sort of password entry, where the entered characters are masked with asterisks, is fairly common.) In this case, the dialog should not enable the Next button until the passwords in both fields match. This ensures that user does not continue in the wizard until they have a valid password, but anyone looking over the user's shoulder cannot see the password.
Third, data that has been entered must remain persistent if the user goes back across the panels. Again, this isn't hard, so long as the data remains in memory. However, there's some logic to keep in mind here as well. Let's again look at the example of Panel 3 connecting and transmitting data to a server. If the user goes backwards from Panel 4, they should not jump immediately to a panel that re-transmits the exact same data to the server. Instead, they need to skip over the step that actually transmits the data and jump to Panel 2 where data can be re-entered.
If you're getting the impression that numbering our panels with an integer code is a bad idea, that's exactly right. It's often better to give each panel an Object identifier, such as a string. Then, when we need to move forward or backward, we can ask the current panel for the identifier of the next panel or the previous panel that it should traverse to. Note that the next and previous panel identifiers returned by the current panel are not guaranteed to remain constant, and may change based on context and user input.
So, with those design considerations in mind, let's outline a set of classes that we're going to write to create our extensible wizard dialog.
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Creating Wizard Dialogs with Java Swing
Wizard dialogs are ubiquitous in today's desktop applications. This article creates a framework for a simple wizard dialog, complete with Back, Next, and Cancel buttons that you can extend for use in your applications as necessary.
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