JavaFX FileChooser initial directory

Question

In Swing, the JFileChooser pointed to the user's default directory which is typically the "My Documents" folder in Windows. The JavaFX FileChooser does not have the same behavior by default. There is a setInitialDirectory method which should be fine, however there are a number of places in the application that we open FileChoosers. Unfortunately the FileChooser class is final, so I cannot simply extend the class and just call the setInitialDirectory once. Is there anything else I could do besides going through the entire application and adding the setInitialDirectory calls?

Answer 1

There's the obvious solution, to just create a static utility method somewhere:

public class MyUtilities {

    public static FileChooser createFileChooser() {
        FileChooser chooser = new FileChooser();
        chooser.setInitialDirectory(new File(System.getProperty("user.home"));
        return chooser ;
    }
}

Then you can just do

FileChooser chooser = MyUtilities.createFileChooser();

whenever you need one.

I actually prefer, from a user experience perspective, to use a single FileChooser instance for the whole application (or at least for each functional portion of a large application). That way it maintains the last directory the user visited, which is more convenient imho.