Java Swing GUI hour glass

Question

There is a JTabbedPane In my Swing program. When user clicks on a tab, the program takes a while to get the data and process the results, then shows the results in the selected tab.

How can I display a hour glass, or something of that effect so that user knows it's processing data? Not to click on the tab again before it finishes it job.

Answer 1

A JProgressBar (possibly in indetermiante mode) sounds right - put that on the tab until the data has been fetched. A well-designed UI shouldn't force the user to wait for long-running tasks to complete and instead allow them to do something else inbetween.

Answer 2

The simplest way is to just call setCursor on the appropriate component (probably the top-level window) with the appropriate Cursor.

component.setCursor(Cursor.getPredefinedCursor(Cursor.WAIT_CURSOR));

And then set it back when you are done.

component.setCursor(Cursor.getDefaultCursor());

Answer 3

setCursor(int) is deprecated. This is probably a bit cleaner:

setCursor(Cursor.getPredefinedCursor(Cursor.WAIT_CURSOR));

Answer 4

As the other answers mention, you can set a wait cursor, but you also mention preventing additional mouse clicks. You can use a glass pane to prevent clicks on components until the long operation is finished. In addition to the Sun tutorials on the glass pane, there is a nice example at http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/Swing-JFC/DemonstrateuseofGlassPane.htm

Answer 5

I would as other mentioned

• Change the cursor
• Use a SwingWorker
• Display the progressbar or an animated image in the glasspane
• Hide the glasspane when the task is completed
• Restore the default cursor