Create JScrollPane example

Ilias TsagklisNovember 11th, 2012Last Updated: April 5th, 2013

0 624 1 minute read

In this example we are going to see how to create a JScrollPane container in a Java Desktop Application. This is one of the most important components in a GUI application, especially when your client code has to handle and to display a large amount of data.

It is very simple to create a JScrollPane. All you have to do is:

Create a new JFrame.
Create a JTextArea.
Call new JScrollPane(textArea) to create a scrollable Text Area. Remember that JScrollPane is a container and you can add any component you want to it to make it scrollable.
Use setHorizontalScrollBarPolicy and setVerticalScrollBarPolicy to set the vertical and horizontal scroll bar policies.

Let’s see the code:

package com.javacodegeeks.snippets.desktop;
 
import java.awt.FlowLayout;
 
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JScrollPane;
import javax.swing.JTextArea;
 
public class CreateJScrollPaneExample {
 
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
 
    private static void createAndShowGUI() {
 
        // Create and set up the window.
        final JFrame frame = new JFrame("Scroll Pane Example");
 
        // Display the window.
        frame.setSize(200, 200);
        frame.setVisible(true);
        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
 
        // set flow layout for the frame
        frame.getContentPane().setLayout(new FlowLayout());
 
        JTextArea textArea = new JTextArea(5, 5);
        JScrollPane scrollableTextArea = new JScrollPane(textArea);
 
        scrollableTextArea.setHorizontalScrollBarPolicy(JScrollPane.HORIZONTAL_SCROLLBAR_ALWAYS);
        scrollableTextArea.setVerticalScrollBarPolicy(JScrollPane.VERTICAL_SCROLLBAR_ALWAYS);
 
        frame.getContentPane().add(scrollableTextArea);
 
    }
 
    public static void main(String[] args) {
 
  //Schedule a job for the event-dispatching thread:
 
  //creating and showing this application's GUI.
 
  javax.swing.SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
 
public void run() {
 
    createAndShowGUI(); 
 
}
 
  });
    }
 
}