Ep.8: Text History - Network Chat Programming

Key Takeaways

hey what's up guys My Name Is AO and welcome to episode 8 of network chat programming so last time which was a while ago we left off with having this pretty cool window here where the user could enter their name you know an IP address so like Local Host for example and a port like 8192 for example like we have here then they could hit the login button and uh presumably you know the client logs in and they're traded with this window um and today we're going to talk about a few things we're probably going to um talk about actually passing this data into actual login thing so you can see that we pass it in here but um we'll more or less talk about that a bit further and also um first thing I want to fix up here is uh this request Focus thing like um you know what happens is when we kind of launch this application and we log in you know whatever Yan Local Host 8192 then we hit log in like the user can't type straight away right there's no focus on this um and it's pretty easy to actually request Focus after we hit the set visible true okay straight after that we we actually have to type the component we want so text message is the name of our um text field and uh request uh focus in window okay that's the proper way to do it request focus is a bit on it it it works but it's more or less platform dependent might not work for all circumstances and this also will not request Focus to the window just the component in the window so if you minimize or something it's not going to um appear at you and harass you so Cho Local Host 8192 if we hit log in what we should see is as you can see the window is straight away uh the message Windows is available for us to type straight away so cool um now let's talk about how we can get the send button right now or when the user hits enter how we can actually get that to post something into this text history because this is a text history in fact what we want to have here is a way to write to this as like a console okay so we might want to display a message being like blah blah blah logged in at this time or connection successful or connection failed or connection retrying you know what I mean like a console kind of window so the user knows what's going on um so let's talk about doing that now so what we have is this awesome text history which is a j text area and we need a function here in our client uh. Java class now remember client. Java is more or less a um it's it's our window okay it's not actually probably going to contain any of the um the code to actually send messages and receive messages and stuff it's probably just going to be there um for the purpose of playing our window as a graphical interface um and because of that all of our methods that actually write to the console should be here um so we'll just make a public method here um a public void we'll call it um uh let's say client dot we could call it console okay um and this would be like a right line kind of um print line to the console thing um and then we'll print whatever we want so string message or string text um and then what we want to do here is simply type text uh area I think it's called text history dot um that's not it okay it is it it's just not Global so make sure we take the text area here and we actually um let's copy that and then let's get rid of the text area here and then we'll paste what we just copied into the top here so private and then jxt area text history that will make it Global first class uh which is good here and make sure it's private because we don't need to be accessing it from anywhere else so text history Dot come on give me some oh there we go oh it's text R history why is it text R history anyway um guess cuz it's a text area I don't know why we called it that but anyway um text area. append uh and then our message okay um now what this will do is append whatever we want into the um into the actual console so let's test that out real quick when we do create this um and this is in the create window thing here um what we want to do is let's just type in uh text r history dot um no hang on we just made a method for that uh let's type in console and then we can um type in something like successfully connected you know even though we don't know if it's successfully connected or not let's just type that in anyway so again we'll go Yan Local Host 8192 hit log in and you can see that it says successfully connected now and that's really cool now what happens if we try to do that again okay what if we do two lines so console and then let's do another line and we'll call it uh successfully disconnected I don't know just for fun um let's hit up uh that hit log in okay you can see it's on the same line not cool right we want we want everything to be on the on a different line um so how can we do that well if we go down over here um after append we can actually add in fact I'm not sure if a pend will actually have anything to do with that no it doesn't have anything in the Java doc but um if if we actually append to this message literally here if we just type in plus and then back slash uh n back SL r that will actually give us I was just thinking n is n is new line right n is new line in consoles R is um more or less kind of the same thing but if we try that out and we type in Yan Local Host 8192 what we should get is as you can see them on separate lines and that is pretty cool you probably don't need both of them there SL n/r not quite sure that sln would work I know SLR will but you know have both of them there for safety um so now we've got a way to write stuff to the console okay um and that's pretty that's pretty cool okay so um that's probably going to wrap up this episode what we're doing as well which is actually um kind of important here is we're actually setting whatever our name is into these variables so what I could do is in fact let's do this quickly um so uh we could we could do something like um attempting a attempting a connection uh with um and then we could add the name here at uh um hang on no so attempting connection with like yarn or something that doesn't really sound right does it um attempting a connection for whatever um no hang on I am scroll up the English part of this aren't I um what sounds good so attempting attempting a connection I guess two and then our server which is address at H we could probably do uh just a column there Plus Port um plus you know user and then plus our name here okay and I guess that would look more or less correct here make sure we have a plus here as well Okay cool so if we run this and we go Yan Local Host uh 8192 then what we should get is as you can see over here so attempting a connection to Local Host a192 um use a yarn okay that's it um and that basically just demonstrates that we actually have the ability to uh do this stuff now one thing one other thing I want to cover because this episode's kind of short and and I know you guys want to see content every time we uh ex we basically hit the send button we want to grab the everything we got in fact I might actually sa that for the later episode because it is a bit more involved because we want stuff like um the an key to work but um what we'll cover next episode probably is this um this text this text message history kind of thing I think it's just called text message but um this this field right let me just make sure you guys can see that this text field okay um because we essentially want people to be able to type in like hi and then hit enter we don't want them to be we don't want them to hit send like they can obviously if they want to but um we want them to be able to hit enter so we'll cover keyboard uh listening into this field next time so so I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of network chat programming if you did please hit the like button again same as with game programming series if this hits 200 likes I'll release one video per day not of this series just one video per day in general of either the game programming or the network chat programming series uh if it hits two likes then I'll release uh two videos per day most likely one of each okay so make sure you hit that like button if you guys did enjoy this video later guys [Music]