Help accessing swing components created in method

[peck3277]

Hey guys,

I'm trying to develop a simple tool. I'm having but I'm having trouble accessing some swing components.

My gui basically has a jtabbed pane with two, jbuttons beneath it. Each tab is identical except for the title, it has a jtextarea and two jbuttons. These buttons perform an action on the jtextarea of the tab. The two buttons I mentioned earlier(the ones not in the jtabbed area) perform the same action to every jtextarea on each tab.

This is all built in one class. The tabs are created in a method, using a loop I create x amount of tabs(it's important that it's variable).
I am having trouble figuring out how to perform actions on the jtextareas in each tab? Should I be creating a reference arraylist or something? Or is my design poor? Should I possibly create a new class in which I build the tabs?

[NormR1]

If the variables are defined as class variables, all methods in the class should be able to access them.

[Zaad]

its better you post the code on what you have done so far so that we would be able to help based on that