ActionListener

Hello all,

I'm trying to understand how to invoke an ActionListener but maintain a
variable that will be available to another ActionListener called "previous".
The problem is how to have a variable persists between calls. I want to
populate the ArrayList everytime the user hits next or previous and use my
variable to position it at the correct index.

As you no doubt can tell, i'm relatively new to java.

Thanks for any help

private class nextButtonListener implements ActionListener
{
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)
{
int hold=0;
int index=0;
String name="";
ArrayList names = new ArrayList();
names = getNames();

name = names.get(index).toString();
System.out.println(name);
System.out.println(index);
index = index++;

}
}

private class previousButtonListener implements ActionListener
{
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)
{
int hold=0;
int index=0;
String name="";
ArrayList names = new ArrayList();
names = getNames();//populates ArrayList

name = names.get(index).toString();
System.out.println(name);
System.out.println(index);
index = index++;

}
}