Consume MouseEvent to prevent JList and JTree from receiving?!

Question

I have a JTree and a JList where I have made the CellRenderer so that it has a "button" area. When this button is clicked, I want something to happen. This I have achieved just nicely with a MouseListener, as per suggestion from JavaDocs.
However, the problem is that when a click is deemed to be within the "button", I do not want the tree or list to process it anymore. But doing e.consume(), both on mousePressed or mouseClicked (though it obviously is pressed the JList and JTree themselves listen to) doesn't do jack.
How can I achieve this functionality?

Answer 1

da.futt wrote:
stolsvik wrote:
Okay, I managed with a hack: It is the order of listeners that's the problem: The ListUI's MouseListener is installed before mine, and hence will get the MouseEvent before me, so it has already processed it when I get it, and hence consuming it makes no difference. No. Normally, listeners are notified latest-registered to earliest-registered. I don't remember seeing an exception to that rule in the core API. well, you are both right (or wrong ;-) - the rule is: the order of listener notification is undefined, it's an implementation detail which listeners must not rely on. "Anecdotical" experience is that AWTListeners are notified first-registered-first-served, while listeners to swing specific events are notified last-registered-first-served. Below is a snippet (formulated in context of SwingX convenience classes, too lazy ...) showing that difference.
The latter probably stems from hefty c&p of notification by walking the EventListenerList: the earliest code was implemented very near the beginning of Swing when every little drop of assumed performance optimization was squeezed, such as walking from back to front. Using EventListenerList involves lots of code duplication ... so lazy devs as we all are, simply c&p'ed that loop and just changed the concrete event type and method name. More recently, as in the we-use-all-those-nifty-cool-language-features ;-) I've seen more usage of forEach loops (f.i. in beansbinding) so notification is back to first-in-first-served :-)
Bottom line: don't rely on any sequence - if needed, use an eventBus (or proxy or however it's called) and define the order there. Darryl's suggestion is as close as we can get in Swing (as it's not supported) but not entirely safe: there's no way to get notified when listeners are added/removed and no hook where to plug-in such a bus into the ui-delegate where it would belong.
Cheers
Jeanette
// output
02.10.2009 14:21:57 org.jdesktop.swingx.event.EventOrderCheck$1 mousePressed
INFO: first added mouseListener
02.10.2009 14:21:57 org.jdesktop.swingx.event.EventOrderCheck$2 mousePressed
INFO: second added mouseListener
02.10.2009 14:21:58 org.jdesktop.swingx.event.EventOrderCheck$4 valueChanged
INFO: second added listSelectionListener
02.10.2009 14:21:58 org.jdesktop.swingx.event.EventOrderCheck$3 valueChanged
INFO: first added listSelectionListener
// produced by
import java.awt.event.MouseAdapter;
import java.awt.event.MouseEvent;
import java.awt.event.MouseListener;
import java.util.logging.Logger;
import javax.swing.JList;
import javax.swing.event.ListSelectionEvent;
import javax.swing.event.ListSelectionListener;
import org.jdesktop.swingx.InteractiveTestCase;
import org.jdesktop.test.AncientSwingTeam;
public class EventOrderCheck extends InteractiveTestCase {
    public void interactiveOrderAWTEvent() {
        JList list = new JList(AncientSwingTeam.createNamedColorListModel());
        MouseListener first = new MouseAdapter() {
            @Override
            public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) {
                LOG.info("first added mouseListener");
        MouseListener second = new MouseAdapter() {
            @Override
            public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) {
                LOG.info("second added mouseListener");
        list.addMouseListener(first);
        list.addMouseListener(second);
        ListSelectionListener firstSelection = new ListSelectionListener() {
            @Override
            public void valueChanged(ListSelectionEvent e) {
                if (e.getValueIsAdjusting()) return;
                LOG.info("first added listSelectionListener");
        ListSelectionListener secondSelection = new ListSelectionListener() {
            @Override
            public void valueChanged(ListSelectionEvent e) {
                if (e.getValueIsAdjusting()) return;
                LOG.info("second added listSelectionListener");
        list.addListSelectionListener(firstSelection);
        list.addListSelectionListener(secondSelection);
        showWithScrollingInFrame(list, "event order");
    @SuppressWarnings("unused")
    private static final Logger LOG = Logger.getLogger(EventOrderCheck.class
            .getName());
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        EventOrderCheck test = new EventOrderCheck();
        try {
            test.runInteractiveTests();
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
}