How To Create Menu Bar IN AWT

Introduction

in today' s article you will learn what a menu is and how to create a bar using awt.

Menus are very familiar to programmers in the Windows environment. A menu has a pull-down list of menu items from which the user can select one at a time. When many options in multiple categories exist for selection by the user, menus are the best choice since they take less space on the frame. A click on the MenuItem generates an ActionEvent and is handled by an ActionListener. A Menu and a MenuItem are not components since they are not subclasses of the java.awt.Component class. They are derived from the MenuComponent class. The following hierarchy illustrates that.

Menu Hierarchy

Menu creation involves many classes, like MenuBar, MenuItem and Menu and one is added to the other.

MenuComponent

A MenuComponent is the highest level class of all menu classes; like a Component, it is the super most class for all component classes like Button, Frame etc. A MenuBar is capable of holding the menus and a Menu can hold menu items. Menus are placed on a menu bar.

Procedure for Creating Menus

The following is the procedure for creating menus:

Create menu bar
Add menu bar to the frame
Create menus
Add menus to menu bar
Create menu items
Add menu items to menus
Event handling

In the following program, a menu is created and populated with menu items. User's selected menu item or sub-menu item's

import java.awt.*;
class AWTMenu extends Frame
{
MenuBar mbar;
Menu menu,submenu;
MenuItem m1,m2,m3,m4,m5;
public AWTMenu()
{
// Set frame properties
setTitle("AWT Menu"); // Set the title
setSize(300,300); // Set size to the frame
setLayout(new FlowLayout()); // Set the layout
setVisible(true); // Make the frame visible
setLocationRelativeTo(null); // Center the frame
// Create the menu bar
mbar=new MenuBar();
// Create the menu
menu=new Menu("Menu");
// Create the submenu
submenu=new Menu("Sub Menu");
// Create MenuItems
m1=new MenuItem("Menu Item 1");
m2=new MenuItem("Menu Item 2");
m3=new MenuItem("Menu Item 3");
m4=new MenuItem("Menu Item 4");
m5=new MenuItem("Menu Item 5");
// Attach menu items to menu
menu.add(m1);
menu.add(m2);
menu.add(m3);
// Attach menu items to submenu
submenu.add(m4);
submenu.add(m5);
// Attach submenu to menu
menu.add(submenu);
// Attach menu to menu bar
mbar.add(menu);
// Set menu bar to the frame
setMenuBar(mbar);
}
public static void main(String args[])
{
new AWTMenu();
}
}

Sample output of this program: