Difference in JComboBox and JSpinner

Question

I am writing a Java Desktop utility in Java swing and have a minimal part of the GUI in it, most of the work is done on the server side, that is, on the backend. Thus, I do not want to spend a lot of time on a part of the GUI, studying different controls and widgets. The problem is that Swing has two controls for (for me) the same tasks, i.e. drop-down menu, and they are JComboBox and JSpinner I do not know the difference, and I do not want any restrictions that would prevent me from completing mine after I selected it.

I have to use the drop-down list to display the List<String> returned from the DataBase, and can have up to a thousand values. So that the user does not start scrolling, I will enter an alphabetic alphabet as input or some kind of category restriction will be like this, so it may be that I will use certain values ​​to display from List<String> . I want my program to be as effective as possible and spend less time in the foreground, since there are many operations on the backend.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Answer 1

• you're talking about JComboBox / JTextField startup

• with some effort one could apply ( AutoComplete JTextField ) to JSpinner too

I have to use the drop-down list to display the list returned from the database, and can have up to a thousand values.

• all of the above JComponents are based on a premature array, you may need to convert java.util.List to String[] or Vector (depends on your code logics)

• none of the GUIs are designed to support thousands of values, see Paginations for Databases engine

• the aforementioned AutoComplete JComboBox / JTextField works without any problems up to 2 thousand lines on today's PC

• for a search or selection from the largest arrays you see Stepped JComboBox (about two or more JComboBoxes )

  1.st for a smaller selection from [0-9, AZ]

  2.nd for searching started entries with A (for example)

• redirect Database events to background tasks and use SwingWorker or Runnable#Thread

Answer 2

The main difference is in the model: the SpinnerModel implementation creates a sequence of values, but the ComboBoxModel does not. If the objects in SpinnerModel do not have a suitable natural order, you will need to overlay one.

As a practical question, “thousands of meanings” will be useful from a supportive approach, as suggested by @mKorbel's answer .

Answer 3

JComboBox meets your requirement. JComboBox is suitable for displaying a list of values. JSpinner is used when you want to perform some functions, such as incerement / decment in the Spinner text box.

This Oracle tutorial explains JSpinner and its similarities to JComboBox . There is also a demo application.