OfficeBean won't display after moving containing Swing Panel from one Container to another

Question

Hi,

I'm developing a Java 6 applet which allows users to view OO (v.3.2) documents (read only), and if they choose, click a button which launches a new JDialog window, with the document displayed in it which allows the user to and mark and redact it as they wish. Once they are done, they can close the JDialog, which saves the document to a server and redisplay the updated document (read-only again) in the original applet window

I guessed that I could do this with a single instance of an OfficeBean, embedded in a Swing Panel. However, I cannot seem to successfully move my Panel (containing the OfficeBean) from the applet to the JDialog when the "Redact" button is clicked. All I get is a blank area in the JDialog where the document should be. I get no errors.

I have currently managed to get round this by creating new instances of the OfficeBean every time I need to display the document (once when the applet is loaded, again when the user chooses to redact and it is opened in a JDialog, and finally when they click "Save" in the dialog and the redacted result is displayed in the applet again.) However this means three trips to and from the server where the documents originate. That seems mad to me.

I'm in no way a Swing expert and may well be making a silly mistake. However, I've done a lot of fiddling around, debugging and googling and can't seem to get this to work. Can anyone help me in this? Am I trying to do something which is fundamentally impossible? I hope not.

Answer 1

One rule in Swing is that a component can only be displayed / attached to one part of the gui "tree" at a time. When you "move" your component to the dialog, are you first removing it from the applet?