Swing Menus and Toolbars - The Definitive Guide to Java Swing - page 154

component is set to a menu on the menu bar, the menu components appear in a pop-up menu
within a window.

■ Caution The helpMenu property, although available with a set-and-get method, is unsupported in the

Swing releases through 5.0. Calling either accessor method will throw an error. With some future release of
Swing, the helpMenu property will likely make a specific JMenu the designated help menu. Exactly what
happens when a menu is flagged as the help menu is specific to the installed look and feel. What tends to
happen is that the menu becomes the last, or rightmost, menu.

Table 6-1. JMenuBar Properties

Property Name Data Type Access

accessibleContext AccessibleContext

Read-only

borderPainted boolean Read-write

component Component Read-only

helpMenu JMenu Read-write

margin Insets Read-write

menuCount int Read-only

selected boolean / Component Read-write

selectionModel SingleSelectionModel

Read-write

subElements MenuElement[ ] Read-only

UI MenuBarUI Read-write

UIClassID String

Read-only

■ Note The selected property of JMenuBar is nonstandard. The getter method returns a boolean to
indicate if a menu component is selected on the menu bar. The setter method accepts a Component argument
to select a component on the menu bar.

Customizing a JMenuBar Look and Feel
Each predefined Swing look and feel provides a different appearance and set of default UIResource
values for the JMenuBar and each of the menu components. Figure 6-3 shows the appearance
of all these menu components for the preinstalled set of look and feel types: Motif, Windows,
and Ocean.