Java Swing Date Picker Example

Jyoti Jha

Swing is a GUI widget toolkit for Java. It is part of Oracle’s Java Foundation Classes (JFC) – an API for providing a graphical user interface (GUI) for Java programs. Swing was developed to provide a more sophisticated set of GUI components than the earlier Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT). JAVA provides a rich set of libraries to create Graphical User Interface in platform independent way.

1. Introduction

Swing API is set of extensible GUI Components to ease developer’s life to create JAVA based Front End/ GUI Applications. It is build upon top of AWT API and acts as replacement of AWT API as it has almost every control corresponding to AWT controls. Swing component follows a Model-View-Controller architecture to fulfill the following criteria.

2. JAVA Swing

Unlike AWT, Java Swing provides platform-independent and lightweight components.

The javax.swing package provides classes for java swing API such as JButton, JTextField, JTextArea, JRadioButton, JCheckbox, JMenu, JColorChooser etc.

2.1 MVC Architecture

Swing API architecture follows loosely based MVC architecture in the following manner.

Every user interface considers the following three main aspects:

2.2 Swing Features

2.3 Setup

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Prerequisite
This example is developed on Eclipse therefore a compatible Eclipse IDE is required to be installed on the system.
We also need WindowBuilder tool to be installed on Eclipse IDE for the easiness of the work. To learn how to install WindowBuilder tool please visit the Setup section 2.1 of the following link click here.

2.4 Class and description

2.5 SWING UI Elements

3. Java Swing Date Picker

In this section, you will learn how to display date picker using java swing. The date picker lets the user select the Date through an easy interface that pops up with a Calendar. The user can navigate through the Calendar and select a date. It contains an editable date picker, a date field, a multiple month calendar and a month component. You can select any date from the Date Picker.

3.1 Code

Code for the following will look the one below.

DatePickerExample.java 

package swing_1;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
class DatePicker {
	int month = java.util.Calendar.getInstance().get(java.util.Calendar.MONTH);
	int year = java.util.Calendar.getInstance().get(java.util.Calendar.YEAR);;
	JLabel l = new JLabel("", JLabel.CENTER);
	String day = "";
	JDialog d;
	JButton[] button = new JButton[49];
	public DatePicker(JFrame parent) {
		d = new JDialog();
		d.setModal(true);
		String[] header = { "Sun", "Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thur", "Fri", "Sat" };
		JPanel p1 = new JPanel(new GridLayout(7, 7));
		p1.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(430, 120));
		for (int x = 0; x  6)
				button[x].addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
					public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ae) {
						day = button[selection].getActionCommand();
						d.dispose();
					}
				});
			if (x < 7) {
				button[x].setText(header[x]);
				button[x].setForeground(Color.red);
			}
			p1.add(button[x]);
		}
		JPanel p2 = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1, 3));
		JButton previous = new JButton("<>");
		next.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
			public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ae) {
				month++;
				displayDate();
			}
		});
		p2.add(next);
		d.add(p1, BorderLayout.CENTER);
		d.add(p2, BorderLayout.SOUTH);
		d.pack();
		d.setLocationRelativeTo(parent);
		displayDate();
		d.setVisible(true);
	}
	public void displayDate() {
		for (int x = 7; x < button.length; x++)
			button[x].setText("");
		java.text.SimpleDateFormat sdf = new java.text.SimpleDateFormat(
				"MMMM yyyy");
		java.util.Calendar cal = java.util.Calendar.getInstance();
		cal.set(year, month, 1);
		int dayOfWeek = cal.get(java.util.Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK);
		int daysInMonth = cal.getActualMaximum(java.util.Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH);
		for (int x = 6 + dayOfWeek, day = 1; day <= daysInMonth; x++, day++)
			button[x].setText("" + day);
		l.setText(sdf.format(cal.getTime()));
		d.setTitle("Date Picker");
	}
	public String setPickedDate() {
		if (day.equals(""))
			return day;
		java.text.SimpleDateFormat sdf = new java.text.SimpleDateFormat(
				"dd-MM-yyyy");
		java.util.Calendar cal = java.util.Calendar.getInstance();
		cal.set(year, month, Integer.parseInt(day));
		return sdf.format(cal.getTime());
	}
}
class DatePickerExample {
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		JLabel label = new JLabel("Selected Date:");
		final JTextField text = new JTextField(20);
		JButton b = new JButton("popup");
		JPanel p = new JPanel();
		p.add(label);
		p.add(text);
		p.add(b);
		final JFrame f = new JFrame();
		f.getContentPane().add(p);
		f.pack();
		f.setVisible(true);
		b.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
			public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ae) {
				text.setText(new DatePicker(f).setPickedDate());
			}
		});
	}
}

3.2 Output

DatePickerExampe
DatePickerExampe
DatePickerExampe

4. Download

This was an example of Java Date Picker Example.

Download
You can download the full source code of this example here: DatePickerExample
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