Does Swing support Windows 7-style file choosers?

Question

I just added a standard \"Open file\" dialog to a small desktop app I\'m writing, based on the JFileChooser entry of the Swing Tutorial. It\'s generating a

Answer 1

Even native Windows applications can get this type of dialog displayed on Windows 7. This is usually controlled by flags in OPENFILENAME structure and its size passed in a call to WinAPI function GetOpenFileName. Swing (Java) uses hooks to get events from the Open File dialog; these events are passed differently between Windows XP and Windows 7 version.

So the answer is you can't control the look of FileChooser from Swing. However, when Java gets support for this new look, you'll get the new style automatically.

Another option is to use SWT, as suggested in this answer. Alternatively you can use JNA to call Windows API or write a native method to do this.