Is there a way to hide the tab bar of JTabbedPane if only one tab exists?

Question

I want a behavior similar to e.g. Firefox where the list of available tabs does only show up if at least two tabs exist.

I wasn't able to find anything like that, yet.

The best idea I had was changing the layout manually:

• in case of one component, just add that to the surrounding panel
• if a component is added, remove the component from the surrounding panel, add a JTabbedPane instead and add both the previous and the new component to that pane.
• if a component is removed and only one component is left in the pane, remove the pane and add the contained component instead.

While this would probably work it feels like a hack or workaround...

Any better idea?

A solution should ideally work in both Java 1.5 and 1.6... but I'd be happy about a 1.6-only solution, too.

Answer 1

I believe you'll have to do it manually. Apparently it has been done before, but only as a small bit of a system which seems to not be available.

Your approach looks good to me. I would do it just like you laid it out, and wrap all that logic in a custom JComponent so it will feel less hackish.

Answer 2

You may be better of by simply using CardLayout. Check it out at http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/CardLayout.html