How do I loop through buttons and disable them in Java?

Question

I'm making an app in Android studio and I have buttons for categories from 1 to count . This is how I created them:

category1 = (Button) findViewById(R.id.cat1Btn);
category1.setOnClickListener(this);

category2 = (Button) findViewById(R.id.cat2Btn);
category2.setOnClickListener(this);
...

What I want to do now is loop through each button and leave only the first button enabled. So I want to disable them from i to count like so:

for (int i=userProgress+2; i<=count; i++){
       String categoryName = "category" + i;
       categoryName.setEnabled(false);
}

This obviously doesn't work because it doesn't refer to a specific button, it's just a String. But I hope this shows you what I am trying to achieve. Basically I just need to figure out a way how to use an index to reference a button. How could I go about doing this?

Any help is appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

I recommend you keep all these buttons in a data structure such as an array. Then, iterate over each one of them in a loop, and as you write earlier: button[i].setEnabled(false);