Purposes of this assignment

• To teach basic GUI creation
• To teach exception handling

Since I want everyone to have some experience coding a GUI, this is an individual assignment. You will not have a partner.

What a magic square is

A magic square is an array of numbers from 1 to N squared, such that the sum of the numbers in each row, each column, and each of the two diagonals is the same. For example, here is a 3x3 magic square:

How to create a magic square

There is a simple algorithm for creating an odd-order magic square (a magic square with an odd number of rows and columns).

Your assignment

  Write a program that creates and displays magic squares. Here are the specific requirements:

Use the following classes:

public class MagicSquareMaker extends JFrame

Contains the public static void main(String args[]) method, which creates an instance of MagicSquareMaker and calls its makeGui method. The makeGui method creates the GUI (adding components and listeners) and displays it.

In addition, MagicSquareMaker contains a method named fillPanel that takes a JPanel and a magic square as arguments, removes the previous contents (if any) of the JPanel, attaches a GridLayout manager to the JPanel, and creates and adds N*N numeric labels to the JPanel, where N is the order of this magic square.

public class MagicSquare

Has a constructor that takes an odd positive integer argument, and creates a magic square of that order. Has a method getMagicSquareArray to return the array representing the magic square.

public class MagicSquareTest

Tests the MagicSquare class.

That is,

public class MagicSquareMaker extends JFrame {
    public static void main(String args[]) {
        new MagicSquareMaker().makeGui(5);
    }
    void makeGui(int n) {...}
    void fillPanel(JPanel panel, MagicSquare square) {...}
}
public class MagicSquare {
    public MagicSquare(int size) {...} // constructor
    public int[][] getMagicSquareArray() {...}
}
public class MagicSquareTest {...}

Necessary information

Usually, when you create a GUI, you don't keep changing the layout managers or the components. If you do, you have to do a little extra work.

removeAll()

This message, sent to a Container, will remove all the JComponents in that Container. Use this to remove the old JLabels from your magic square, before changing the layout manager and putting in the new JLabels.

validate()

This message, sent to a Container, will tell Java that you have changed the contents of that Container, and Java needs to redraw it for you.

Due date

Before 6am Friday April 5. Submit your zipped project file to Canvas. No other form of submission will be accepted.