the names are arbitrary.  I used them in one implementation for
automatically generated labels.  You can stuff anything you want in
there.

Nandu, could you please explain what you are trying to accomplish by
using this approach?  I have a gut feeling that, whatever you are
trying to do, it could probably be done in a different (and perhaps
more elegant) way.

I haven't used getName() and setName() in a while but I'm pretty sure that
getName() will return only the value that you set with setName(). If you
haven't done a setName on the component, you will get either blank or null,
I don't remember which.

Therefore, if you want to identify your components, simply set a name for
each one as you create it with setName(); then, when you loop through the
result from getComponents(), do a getName() on the component and it will
show you the value that you set with setName().

This examples shows the creation and naming of three panels:

   JPanel mainPanel = new JPanel();
   mainPanel.setName("Main panel");
   JPanel preferencesPanel = new JPanel();
   preferencesPanel.setName("Preferences panel");
   JPanel otherPanel = new JPanel();
   preferencesPanel.setName("Other panel");

Let's say you want to put those three panels on some other component, maybe
another JPanel called outerComponent, you would do that as follows (your
code could vary slightly depending on which layout manager your are using):

   JPanel outerComponent = new JPanel();
   outerComponent.add(mainPanel);
   outerComponent.add(preferencesPanel);
   outerComponent.add(otherPanel);

Now, you could use getComponents() to loop through the parts of
outerComponent:

   Component[] myComponents = outerComponent.getComponents();
   for (Component oneComponent : myComponents) {
       System.out.println("component name: " + oneComponent.getName());
   }

The output should be (assuming you added the components to outerComponent in
the same order I did):

   Main panel
   Preferences panel
   Other panel

Naturally, once you have verified the name of each component with getName(),
you can do whatever you like with it; 'oneComponent' is now a reference to
the component so you can use it to modify the component.

Please note that this is all coming out of my head: I have not checked the
API or looked at my old code to verify this so it might be slightly wrong.
But I think it should be pretty close.

My pleasure :-)

--
Rhino

btn_hello is just a variable name. It is not at all the name of the
object. It just happens to reference an object. It is not uniquely
referencing the object and the object doesn't know which variable holds
references to it.

If your code is structured around the need to evaluate variable names,
then it is badly broken. Think of something else. You probably also want
to study a Java textbook a little bit, and have a look at some OO
principles.

Please write real English words. That "style" of communication is
frowned upon here.

/Thomas