How to open a window inside a main frame?

Question

I’m doing a show and I’m creating the layout manually with swing using GridBagLayout and GroupLayout. I wonder how to open a window inside the program I’m doing.

For example: When the user clicks the button Cadastrar Customer, the program will open a docked window in the program in a specified space on the main interface, instead of opening a separate screen.

I don’t want to create a separate screen for each item, but I wanted a main screen of the program and the entire space inside the main screen to be filled with the other sub-screens of entries. I posted an example of Corel Draw program to show just what I’m looking for and improve your understanding:

Answer 1

You can use JInternalFrame to manage your registration screens.

A very simple example. Consider that you have your main screen, MainFrame, that has a menu, something like that:

The summary code needed to create this screen would be more or less this:

public class MainFrame extends JFrame {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = -4985498392168006224L;

    private final JDesktopPane desktop = new JDesktopPane();

    public MainFrame() {
        super("Tela Principal");

        final int inset = 50;
        final Dimension screenSize = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize();
        final Dimension dimension = new Dimension(screenSize.width / 3, screenSize.height / 2);
        this.setBounds(inset, inset, dimension.width - inset * 2, dimension.height - inset * 2);

        this.setContentPane(desktop);
        this.setJMenuBar(this.createMenuBar());

        desktop.setDragMode(JDesktopPane.OUTLINE_DRAG_MODE);
    }

    // esse é o cara chamado ao acessarmos o menu, ou no seu caso, clicar no botão :)
    protected void createFrame() {
        final UsuarioInternalFrame frame = new UsuarioInternalFrame();
        frame.setVisible(true);
        desktop.add(frame);
        try {
            frame.setSelected(true);
        } catch (final PropertyVetoException e) {
            // trate a exceção conforme sua necessidade
        }
    }

}

Obs.: as the intention is not to present the basics of swing, only the use of JInternalFrame, I will not put how to create the menu, open the main screen, etc. =)

As we go on the menu Cadastrals -> Users, we would show a JInternalFrame:

The menu click event, button, etc., basically creates the Internal frame that we need, the method createFrame, of our main screen. The code of UsuarioInternalFrame It’s simple, something like that:

public class UsuarioInternalFrame extends JInternalFrame {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = -619850559630326110L;

    public UsuarioInternalFrame() {
        super("Usuários", true, true, true, true);

        this.setSize(500, 300);

        this.setLocation(30, 30);
    }
}

Then you can have several Internal frames, can maximize them::

Minimize:

Finally, to customize according to your needs, as you said, to make her size stay only in the gray area of your example of Corel, term on the side menus, a Tree, etc. There are several ways to do.

This is just a basic example of how you can use JInternalFrame, can evolve the example, customize as your need. In certain cases you can use JPanel, but if I understand your problem, Internal frames will give you more flexibility if you can not have to customize a JPanel.