Essentially, you’re going to need to supply a “renderer” for the tab. Take a look at JTabbedPane.setTabComponentAt(…) for more information.
The basic idea is to supply a component that will be laid out on the tab.
I typically create a JPanel, onto which I add a JLabel (for the title) and, depending on what I want to display, some kind of control that acts as the close action.
tabPane.addTab(title, tabBody);
int index = tabPane.indexOfTab(title);
JPanel pnlTab = new JPanel(new GridBagLayout());
pnlTab.setOpaque(false);
JLabel lblTitle = new JLabel(title);
JButton btnClose = new JButton("x");
GridBagConstraints gbc = new GridBagConstraints();
gbc.gridx = 0;
gbc.gridy = 0;
gbc.weightx = 1;
pnlTab.add(lblTitle, gbc);
gbc.gridx++;
gbc.weightx = 0;
pnlTab.add(btnClose, gbc);
tabPane.setTabComponentAt(index, pnlTab);
btnClose.addActionListener(myCloseActionHandler);
Now somewhere else, I establish the action handler…
public class MyCloseActionHandler implements ActionListener {
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent evt) {
Component selected = tabPane.getSelectedComponent();
if (selected != null) {
tabPane.remove(selected);
// It would probably be worthwhile getting the source
// casting it back to a JButton and removing
// the action handler reference ;)
}
}
}
Now, you just as easily use any component you like and attach a mouse listener to it and monitor the mouse clicks…
Updated
The above example will only remove the currently active tab, there are a couple of ways to fix this.
The best is to probably provide some means for the action to find the tab it’s associated with…
public class MyCloseActionHandler implements ActionListener {
private String tabName;
public MyCloseActionHandler(String tabName) {
this.tabName = tabName;
}
public String getTabName() {
return tabName;
}
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent evt) {
int index = tabPane.indexOfTab(getTabName());
if (index >= 0) {
tabPane.removeTabAt(index);
// It would probably be worthwhile getting the source
// casting it back to a JButton and removing
// the action handler reference ;)
}
}
}
This uses the name of tab (as used with JTabbedPane#addTab) to find and then remove the tab and its associated component…