How to Add Default Text to a Text Field in JavaFX

In this article, we show how to add default text to a text field in JavaFX.

Default text is text that appears in a text field when the window is loaded.

Most of the time it isn't desired for there to be default text already entered into a text field upon the window being loaded. However, it can be very beneficial and useful for default text to be entered.

An example is a text field that asks a user for his/her school mail address. All students may have the same address, for example, @fresnostate.edu. Therefore, you can enter this by default into the text field. Therefore, the user can just type in the first part (user-specific part) instead of the whole email address.

So to enter in text by default into a text box, we can use the following line.

TextField text= new TextField("Default text entered here");

It's very simple. When you are creating the text field, you simply pass the parameter in at the time of instantiation.

So the default text into this text field above will be, "Default text entered here".

If the text field has already been instantiated, another way to add default text is to take the name of the text field and use the setText() function to add default text.

This is shown below.

TextField text= new TextField(); text.setText("Default text entered here");

So this does the same as the other code.

To see full Java code where default text is added, see the following code shown below.

import javafx.application.Application; import static javafx.application.Application.launch; import javafx.scene.Scene; import javafx.scene.control.Button; import javafx.scene.control.Label; import javafx.scene.control.TextField; import javafx.scene.layout.VBox; import javafx.stage.Stage; public class NewClass1 extends Application { static String result[]; @Override public void start(Stage primaryStage) { primaryStage.setTitle("Students Information"); Label labelfirst= new Label("What is your school email address?"); TextField text= new TextField("@fresnostate.edu"); Button button= new Button("Submit"); VBox layout= new VBox(5); layout.getChildren().addAll(labelfirst, text, button); Scene scene1= new Scene(layout, 400, 250); primaryStage.setScene(scene1); primaryStage.show(); } public static void main(String[] args) { launch(args); } }

So you can see in this code, we've created a text field and at the same time as instantiation, we passed in a string to the text field. This is the default text that will appear in the text field when the window is loaded. So, in this example, the default text that will appear is, "@fresnostate.edu".

The following link is an image of how it looks: JavaFX Default Text in Text Field.

And this is all that is required to add prompt text to a text field in JavaFX.

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