JFileChooser and the Lost Folder Selection

This article was originally posted on JRoller on July 7, 2005

It might sound like an Indiana Jones movie title, but it is an interesting problem we came across. We have a third party product which at some point displays a JFileChooser, in which you must select a directory. In old Java 1.4, this dialog box was working properly. Now that we switched to brand new 5.0, when we select a folder and click on open, it does not come back with the folder as a selected value, but instead goes into the folder. The main difference in the behavior comes from the fact that when we selected a folder, its name was visible in the selected file textfield, and now it is not.

The colleague who had to solve the problem tried to execute the program by copying the 1.4 version of JFileChooser into the bootclasspath. It did not help, so I suggested him to try with the UI class instead. And oh suprise, it works as in the old days. So he started to compare the source code of both versions, and in the ListSelectionListener, he found an interesting difference. A property which was always true before is now set to false by default. So to solve the problem, he inserted the following line in the main method:

UIManager.put("FileChooser.usesSingleFilePane", new Boolean(true));

I wonder if these properties are documented somewhere. There seems to be so many of them...

I checked in my more recent version of Java. This parameter still exists, and still does not seem to be documented.