ComboBox colour change

Question

Hi all,
I've been looking for a way to change the colour of a JComboBox, but only in the editable area. To give you an ideea, this is akin to what certain web-browsers do when the user enters a wrong URL.
Anyways... as far I could find, it seemed that you need to write your own Editor (say, by extending BasicComboBoxEditor for example) for the ComboBox, where obviously you can change pretty much everything. This seems a painfully long and winded solution if I only want to perform a minor change and nothing more.
So basically, all that class-extending just for changing a colour can be compressed in a one-liner... allright - two, if you want to write code which is readable:
1 line:
<combo_box>.getEditor().getEditorComponent().setBackground(new Color(R,G,B));
2 lines:
Component box_editor = <combo_box>.getEditor().getEditorComponent();
box_editor.setBackground(new Color(R,G,B));
I'm not claiming that I've discovered something new here, it's merely a note, just in case anyone ever looks for a quick way of doing it. :)
<ducks the rotten tomatoes>
Ino!~

Answer 1

You can write a ListCellRenderer that renders the objects you add to the JComboBox however you like. Check that out in the API documentation or search the forums for ListCellRenderer, I'm sure you can find an example.