SWT: A Developer's Notebook

Interacting with the Text in the Text Widget

If you are building an interface that displays text to the user from some other source—in other words, you’re using text fields that are populated with text values when the window is opened or data is retrieved—you must directly interact with the contents of the text field.

How do I do that?

There are two possible interactions with the text in a field— reading the text out of the field and pushing text into the field. The SWT widgets use the getXXX( ) and setXXX( ) methods similar to the JavaBeans Specification.

A call to the setText() method of the Text class causes a text value to appear:

text1.setText("Some text goes here");

Warning

You can actually set text here that exceeds the character limit imposed by setTextLimit( ). No harm will occur if you do so, but if you later attempt to take the value in that text field and put it into a database column that would accept text only up to the limit, an error would occur at that point. Care must be taken to ensure that the character limit is not exceeded when you programmatically enter text in this manner.

The converse operation is to read text out of a text field and store it in a variable for programmatic use. For that task, use the getText( ) method:

String contents = text1.getText( );