Java Application Restart or Reset Button

Question

I have a very simple, choose your path, Java game that I am working on in the NetBeans IDE. Basically what happens is the user will click one of the three buttons, and pre-made JLabel 's which are set to "" (nothing) will be reset to whatever text I decide that label should then use. I do this by adding the code below.

private void option1ActionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) {
    jLabel6.setText("You go down the dark tunnel...");
}

Now all this works fine but I'd like a way to restart/reset my application by clicking a button labelled "restart". I don't mind if it has to close the application and then open it again or if it will simply reset all the JLabel's back to "". I just don't want to have to type out the code below for every single JLabel.

jLabel1.setText("");
jLabel2.setText("");
jLabel3.setText("");

I have done some research on this site and none of the code that people provide seems to work for my situation, either because it simply doesn't work or because I am doing something wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated and please try and be specific because I am fairly new to writing Java and don't understand everything.

It would also work for me if someone could provide a way for me to close 1 window in an application instead of the whole thing, like when

System.exit(0);

is used.

Answer 1

First, I recommend importing the JLabel class specifically so you can write JLabel instead of javax.swing.JLabel :

import javax.swing.JLabel;

Instead of declaring each JLabel individually, create an Array of JLabels:

JLabel[] jLabels = new JLabel[N]; // where N is the number of JLabels

Whenever you need to access a JLabel, use:

jLabels[6].setText("You go down the dark tunnel...");

When you want to reset all the JLabels, use:

for (JLabel jLabel : jLabels) {
    jLabel.setText("");
}

For more details on Arrays, read http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/nutsandbolts/arrays.html

Answer 2

If you are having your program as a executable jar file then you can use

public void restert(){
     Runtime.getRuntime().exec("java -jar yourapp.jar");
     System.exit(0);
}

If you want to know more about restarting java application you can go through this

Answer 3

Found the answer to my own question:

Thanks to Holger for suggesting "dispose". This is what I found worked.

private void restartButtonActionPerformed(ActionEvent evt)  {
    if(evt.getSource() == restartButton)
    {
        dispose();
        MyGUI game = new MyGUI();
        game.setVisible(true);
    }
}