Swing components share FocusListener

[kbro3]

Hi All,

I've been stumped by a FocusListener problem in Swing. I'm digging through someone else's code and basically, I have a scenario where one component somehow calls the FocusLost of another component (even though the second component never had focus to begin with).

Is there a programmatic way to call FocusLost of a component? Eg - can I just invoke a FocusLost any old time?

The interesting thing is that one component is a custom hybrid of a textfield with a calendar, let's call it a calendarField class (imagine a textfield which displays date, with a small button in it for selecting date).

Pressing this button invokes FocusLost of an unrelated component. (it's not in the calendarField class, because there are several calendarFields in the dialog, and not all have this anamoly.)

Any help / ideas appreciated!

[pbrockway2]

Is there a programmatic way to call FocusLost of a component?

May be I'm rushing in to an area of darryl's expertise...

Do components have such a method? I thought components have focus listeners and they have a focusLost() method. That method is public, so feel free to call it. But beware because you need to pass it a FocusEvent instance.

Maybe the focusLost() is doing something important like validating stuff. But the whole procedure strikes me as a bit hairy because you don't really have a proper argument to send focusLost(). You could pass null but this sounds like an odd way of doing whatever it is that this focus listener is doing.

[Junky]

If you are attaching the same FocusListener to multiple components then inside the focusLost/Gained methods you need to determine which component lost/gained focus and only execute the appropriate code for that component.

[kbro3]

If you are attaching the same FocusListener to multiple components then inside the focusLost/Gained methods you need to determine which component lost/gained focus and only execute the appropriate code for that component.

That's actually not the case here. Each component has it's own FocusListener. And those are NOT shared.

Basically one component's function somehow calls another's focusLost() and I have no idea how..

Thanks.

[pbrockway2]

Typically coomponents have a whole array of focus listeners. Presumably the component in question gets this array (there's a method for that) and calls the focusLost() of each. But can't you just see from the code? Because if you don't have the code, how do you know focusLost() is being called and why do you care when, as I mentioned, it seems a weird misuse of focusLost() to be called this way.

(I feel I'm setting myself up in the last part...)

[kbro3]

Typically coomponents have a whole array of focus listeners. Presumably the component in question gets this array (there's a method for that) and calls the focusLost() of each. But can't you just see from the code? Because if you don't have the code, how do you know focusLost() is being called and why do you care when, as I mentioned, it seems a weird misuse of focusLost() to be called this way.

(I feel I'm setting myself up in the last part...)

Can't see from the code. Code is large and complex and I haven't familiarised myself with it. focusLost() is definitely being called, i've added a debug message to focusLost() code, so I know it's being called..

Didn't know about the array of focus listeners, will investigate...

Thanks!