How to use BigDecimal in swing GUIs?

Question

I'm using BigDecimal to represent product prices in a Java SE application.

What swing component(s) should I use in order to allow the user to input numbers with only two decimal places and bound it to a BigDecimal variable/Object's property. (Checking that as the user types)?

I've been playing with JTextField, JFormattedTextField, NumberFormatter, MaskFormatter but I can't work it out.

Is there any combination and configuration of those components to do that? or should I extend the MaskFormatter, the JTextField, ...?

Answer 1

I'm not quite sure what you are trying to do, but there is a BigDecimal constructor which takes Strings as parameter (similar to e.g. Double.parseDouble(String s)):

try
{
    BigDecimal decimal = new BigDecimal(yourJTextField.getText());
}
catch (NumberFormatException nfe)
{ /* error handling */}

See JavaDoc for BigDecimal for more information.

Edit: If checking/validating the user's input into the textfield, either check it manually or use a Validator (see Google results for "JTextField Validator")