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I wrote a little java tool with a GUI, that needs a source path (e.g. Music folder) and a destination path (e.g. USB device) entered by the user.

If the user selects a drive that is not available (e.g. select USB device and unplug it afterwards from the PC) I need to output a error message, like "device E:\ not available".

I would like to know, what is a good or professional way to create and show messages in a JFrame GUI? Show messages in a jTextArea? Via Popup?

Right now, I use this solution from Joffrey, but it show the whole error output from the console - what a usual user not understands. How to set output stream to TextArea

Community
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3 Answers3

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If you don't mind to use 3rd party libraries, i recommend to use JXErrorPane by swingX otherwise you can use a simple JOptionPane that is very powerful and customizable.

nachokk
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As nachokk recommended for display the JXErrorPane is very useful to be able to show a human readable message to a user and still have the stack trace accessible.

The other side will be translation of an exception into a message that a user understands. You will need to possibly add additional catch statements that handle each Exception that should generate a different message to the user.

The message text from some exceptions is normally not clear enough on its own. In your app a "File Not Found" message would need to explain to the user if it is the destination or source path.

jzd
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JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(myPanel,
                "Something went wrong",
                "Error!",
                JOptionPane.ERROR_MESSAGE);
Yannick De Turck
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