How can I use a JSlider (or other JComponent) in a JOptionPane option dialog?

Question

I have a UI in which I want to display a popup with a slider bar, with a message, and have the user be able to click OK or Cancel after choosing a value (or not). JOptionPane has various show methods that seem like they'd be useful, but I was unable to find much about making them do what I want.

This is actually a question that I had to root around to find an answer to, and I'll provide it below. I hope it will be useful to someone else.

Answer 1

The examples I was able to find had the standard flaw of examples: they weren't close enough to what I wanted to tell me how to do this, and didn't explain enough about how things worked to alter them on my own. I finally ran across a tutorial which explained that the "messages" in the dialog could be components, and the JOptionPane code would render them. This example uses a JSlider, I assume other JComponents could be used as well.

The documentation also talks about what to do if you want to "display the dialog directly", but I never did figure out what they meant by that.

I stumbled around in various forms of JOptionPane methods before figuring out the following:

/**
 * display the dialog for entering the number of spots to move the first
 * marble chosen after a 7 is played. Returns 0 if the user cancelled this
 * operation.
 */
@Override
public int getMoveCount()
{
    int moveCount = 0;

    JSlider slider = createSlider();
    JPanel sliderPanel = createSliderPanel("myMessage", slider);
    String title = "myTitle"; 
    int dialogResponse = JOptionPane.showOptionDialog
            (this,                  // I'm within a JFrame here
             sliderPanel,
             title,
             JOptionPane.OK_CANCEL_OPTION,
             JOptionPane.QUESTION_MESSAGE,
             null, null, null
            );
    if (JOptionPane.OK_OPTION == dialogResponse) 
         { moveCount = slider.getValue(); }
    else { moveCount = 0; } // works for cancel button, red 'x', and keyboard escape key

    return moveCount;
}

private JSlider createSlider()
{
    JSlider slider = new JSlider(1,7);
    slider.setMajorTickSpacing(1);
    slider.setPaintTicks(true);
    slider.setPaintLabels(true);
    slider.setValue(7);                // default to 7

    return slider;
}