I presume you have a String[] already setup that contains all the
entries that appear in your JComboBox? If so, just add "Select Item
Style" as the first string in the array. Then when no item is chosen
(such as when the GUI is first drawn and the user hasn't set a value for
the combobox) programmatically call combobox.setSelectedIndex(0),
instead of setSelectedIndex(-1) and you will have what you want.

Hal Vaughan schrieb:

Brandon already gave you a solution but there's another way which I'd
call the Swing way ;)

Since your question is related to the presentation of some situation
only and since Swing follows some MVC concept, I'd prefer to handle the
situation in the view.

You can use e. g. the following renderer (or you can design it as a
decorator to have a more generic solution):

    class ComboBoxCellRenderer extends DefaultListCellRenderer {
        private String selectionPrompt;
        private JComboBox comboBox;

        public ComboBoxCellRenderer( JComboBox comboBox,
                                     String selectionPrompt ) {
            this.comboBox = comboBox;
            this.selectionPrompt = selectionPrompt;
        }

        public Component getListCellRendererComponent( JList list,
                Object value, int ix, boolean sel, boolean focus ) {
            super.getListCellRendererComponent( list, value, ix,
                    sel, focus );
            if ( ix == -1 && comboBox.getSelectedIndex() == -1 )
                setText( selectionPrompt );
            return this;
        }
    };

Bye
Michael

I wonder if you could set up two Combo Box models which differ by an
entry and then, after the initial selection, surreptitiously replace
the model (with the appropriate alteration of the selected value).