Is there a way to hide the tab bar of JTabbedPane if only one tab exists?

Question

I want a behavior similar to e.g. Firefox where the list of available tabs does only show up if at least two tabs exist.

I wasn't able to find anything like that, yet.

The best idea I had was changing the layout manually:

• in case of one component, just add that to the surrounding panel
• if a component is added, remove the component from the surrounding panel, add a JTabbedPane instead and add both the previous and the new component to that pane.
• if a component is removed and only one component is left in the pane, remove the pane and add the contained component instead.

While this would probably work it feels like a hack or workaround...

Any better idea?

A solution should ideally work in both Java 1.5 and 1.6... but I'd be happy about a 1.6-only solution, too.

Answer 1

You can override the UI method that calculates the height for the tab button area, forcing the height to 0 when there's only one tab:

tabbed_pane.setUI(new BasicTabbedPaneUI() {  
    @Override  
    protected int calculateTabAreaHeight(int tab_placement, int run_count, int max_tab_height) {  
        if (tabbed_pane.getTabCount() > 1)
            return super.calculateTabAreaHeight(tab_placement, run_count, max_tab_height);  
        else  
            return 0;  
    }  
});