JavaFX - Get CheckBox properties from outside GUIController - user-interface

Question

In JavaFX I want to check if a checkbox is selected and I want to do this using the lookup(#id) method. However this method returns a Node, which doesn't have the isSelected() method.
The code below shows the GUIController and a class Visualize it calls, where the status of the checkbox is read. I added a solution (reading the checkbox properties in GUIController and passing them to Visualize), but this is not how I want to proceed. I whish that the checkbox status is read in Visualize, because there will be many other GUI elements that I need to read so it is more compact to pass on a single object to Visualize instead of a list precomputed in GUIController.
Thank you for suggestions!
GUI Controller:
public class GUIController implements Initializable {
#FXML private AnchorPane RootPane;
#FXML private CheckBox TextCheckBox;
#Override
public void initialize(URL url, ResourceBundle rb) {
Boolean TextCheckBoxSelected = TextCheckBox.isSelected();
Visualize visualizeInstance = new Visualize();
root3D = visualizeInstance.draw(RootPane, TextCheckBoxSelected);
/* ... */
Class called by GUIController:
public class Visualize {
public Visualize() {
//
}
public Group draw(AnchorPane RootPane, Boolean TextCheckBoxSelected) {
System.out.println(RootPane.lookup("#TextCheckBox"));
System.out.println(TextCheckBoxSelected);
/* ... */
Output:
CheckBox[id=TextCheckBox, styleClass=check-box]'Text'
true

Answer 1

If you really want to do it this way, just downcast the result of the lookup:
public class Visualize {
// ...
public Group draw(AnchorPane rootPane) {
CheckBox textCheckBox = (CheckBox) rootPane.lookup("#TextCheckBox");
boolean selected = textCheckBox.isSelected();
// ...
}
}
If you are doing this because you need your Visualize object to respond to changes in the CheckBox's selected state, then consider passing a BooleanProperty instead, which you can observe if you need:
public class Visualize {
private BooleanProperty selectedProperty ;
public Visualize(BooleanProperty selectedProperty) {
this.selectedProperty = selectedProperty ;
// ...
}
// ...
public Group draw() {
boolean selected = selectedProperty.get();
// ...
}
}
and
Visualize visualizeInstance = new Visualize(textCheckBox.selectedProperty());
root3D = visualizeInstance.draw();