JavaFx Editable ComboBox : Showing toString on item selection

Question

I have a ComboBox of type Person , in which I have added few object of Person class,

I have used setCellFa

Answer 1

You need to set a StringConverter on the ComboBox for that purpose (there is no other way, looking at the source code of ComboBox)

Here is an example:

import javafx.application.Application;
import javafx.scene.Group;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.scene.control.Button;
import javafx.scene.control.ComboBox;
import javafx.stage.Stage;
import javafx.util.StringConverter;

import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;

public class ComboBoxTest extends Application {
    private ComboBox cmb_year = new ComboBox<>();

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        launch(args);
    }

    @Override
    public void start(Stage primaryStage) throws Exception {
        Group root = new Group();
        root.getChildren().add(cmb_year);
        cmb_year.setPrefWidth(150);
        Scene scene = new Scene(root, 500, 500);
        primaryStage.setScene(scene);
        primaryStage.show();

        List ints = Arrays.asList(2012, 2013, 2014, 2015);
        cmb_year.getItems().addAll(ints);

        cmb_year.setConverter(
            new StringConverter() {
                @Override
                public String toString(Integer integer) {
                    if (integer == null) {
                        return "";
                    } else {
                        return "that's a year: " + integer.intValue();
                    }
                }

                @Override
                public Integer fromString(String s) {
                    try {
                        return Integer.parseInt(s);
                    } catch (NumberFormatException e) {
                        return null;
                    }
                }
            });

        cmb_year.setPromptText("select year");
        cmb_year.setEditable(true);

        Button distraction = new Button("distraction");
        distraction.setLayoutX(100);
        distraction.setLayoutY(100);
        root.getChildren().add(distraction);
    }
}

result: