21

In .NET you can achieve something like this:

Color yellowColor = Color.FromName("yellow");

Is there a way of doing this in Java without having to resort to reflection?

PS: I am not asking for alternative ways of storing/loading colors. I just want to know wherever it is possible to do this or not.

devoured elysium
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4 Answers4

33

Use reflection to access the static member of the Color class.

Color color;
try {
    Field field = Class.forName("java.awt.Color").getField("yellow");
    color = (Color)field.get(null);
} catch (Exception e) {
    color = null; // Not defined
}
Erick Robertson
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ZZ Coder
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    It is reflection and it is the only solution I can think of. Any other way would require creating a map of colors. – Denis Tulskiy May 18 '10 at 01:46
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    It is reflection but that is welcome. It seems to be the only way to do it...I wonder why does everything in Java have to be so complicated.. – devoured elysium May 18 '10 at 01:51
  • @devoured elysium: After using ruby for some time, I don't like java because you have to reinvent the wheel many times. You can use groovy, it allows you to access fields by the name. – Denis Tulskiy May 18 '10 at 01:57
3

I tried something like this and it worked (at least for JavaFX)

String color = "red";
Color c = Color.web(color);
gc.setFill(color);
gc.fillOval(10, 10, 50, 40);
randy costanza
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1

Why not make a custom class for this? I did this and it is working for me. NB: You will have to include this class in your package. 

import java.awt.Color;

/**
 * A class to get the Color value from a string color name
 */
public class MyColor {
    private Color color;

 public MyColor(){
    color = Color.WHITE;
    }
/**
 * Get the color from a string name
 * 
 * @param col name of the color
 * @return White if no color is given, otherwise the Color object
 */
static Color getColor(String col) {
    switch (col.toLowerCase()) {
    case "black":
        color = Color.BLACK;
        break;
    case "blue":
        color = Color.BLUE;
        break;
    case "cyan":
        color = Color.CYAN;
        break;
    case "darkgray":
        color = Color.DARK_GRAY;
        break;
    case "gray":
        color = Color.GRAY;
        break;
    case "green":
        color = Color.GREEN;
        break;

    case "yellow":
        color = Color.YELLOW;
        break;
    case "lightgray":
        color = Color.LIGHT_GRAY;
        break;
    case "magneta":
        color = Color.MAGENTA;
        break;
    case "orange":
        color = Color.ORANGE;
        break;
    case "pink":
        color = Color.PINK;
        break;
    case "red":
        color = Color.RED;
        break;
    case "white":
        color = Color.WHITE;
        break;
        }
    return color;
    }
}

In some Container i just call it like this 

public JPanel createStatusBar(){
    JPanel statusBar = new JPanel(layoutManager);
    statusBar.setBackgroundColr(MyColor.color("green"));
    // and other properties
    return statusBar;

Hope this helps.

blongho
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1

I open sourced a little library named AWT Color Factory that provides methods for creating java.awt.Color instances from string representations.

These methods are the counterpart of static methods available in javafx.scene.paint.Color, such as Color.web(...) or Color.valueOf(...)

The library is extremely lightweight and does not depend on JavaFX.

siordache
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