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Cannot Find Symbol Error using JOptionPane.showMessageDialog...

The past few times I got this error it was basically something I typed incorrectly that was causing the error. I have looked and looked at these two bits of code but I am unable to find what is wrong.

Error 1:

F:\ClassAverageAJP.java:19: cannot find symbol

symbol : method showMessageDialog(<nulltype>,java.lang.String,int)

location: class javax.swing.JOptionPane

JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "This program will ask the names and test scores"

Code:

JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "This program will ask the names and test scores"

			+ "of 5 students. \n It will then calculate the grade of each student. All of this"

			+ "information \n will be placed in a file of your specification. Once all of the"

			+ "grades have \n been entered, the program will calculate the class average and"

			+ " place it in the file.", JOptionPane.INFORMATION_MESSAGE);

Error 2:

F:\ClassAverageAJP.java:50: cannot find symbol

symbol : method showMessageDialog(<nulltype>,java.lang.String,int)

location: class javax.swing.JOptionPane

JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Each student's average score has been calculated "

Code:

JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Each student's average score has been calculated "

			+ "\nalong with their appropriate grade. The class average has also been calculated."

			+ "\nThe results can be found in this file: " + outputFileName + ".txt", 

			JOptionPane.INFORMATION_MESSAGE);

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Guest

Best Answer

The arguments you're giving don't quite match what's required by ?a rel=nofollow href="http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/javax/swing/JOptionPane.html#showMessageDialog(java.awt.Component, java.lang.Object, java.lang.String, int)" target="_blank">the method you're probably trying to use - you're missing the Title (java.lang.String) parameter.

Code:

public static void showMessageDialog(Component parentComponent,

                                     Object message,

                                     String title,

                                     int messageType)

                              throws HeadlessException

("Cannot find symbol" doesn't just mean that you've typoed the name of something, but it could be that there's no method which takes the number/type of arguments you've given)