Creating mouse rollover events on tab selectors in Swing

Question

Hi,
I have a jTabbedPane on which I have placed several panels to make tabs.
Here are the two problems.
1.How can I control the background color of the tab selector(where the title of the tab resides) when its tab is selected. I have been able to set dynamically the unselected ones.
2. How can I change the color of the text in the title of the tab when the mouse rollovers the tab selector. When a mouse goes over the selector, the text in the selector needs to change to blue. When the mouse leaves the selector the text color needs to go back to black. I need to capture the event for the selector part only.
I have been able to do it with buttons but how can I do it with tab selectors?
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

I just did this quick but hopefully it should help you with the mouse events, simply get the rectangles that are associated with the tabs, and dectect when the mouse is inside of one, or not inside of one
public class TabbedPaneExample {
     JTabbedPane tabbedPane;
     Rectangle r[];
     public TabbedPaneExample() {
          tabbedPane = new JTabbedPane();
          tabbedPane.addTab("PANEL1", new JPanel());
          tabbedPane.addTab("PANEL2", new JPanel());
          tabbedPane.addTab("PANEL3", new JPanel());
          JFrame frame = new JFrame("TabbedExample");
          frame.setSize(400, 400);
          frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
          frame.getContentPane().add(tabbedPane);
          frame.setVisible(true);
          //Get the rectangles associated with each tab
          TabbedPaneUI ui = tabbedPane.getUI();
          r = new  Rectangle[3];
          for (int j = 0; j < 3; j++)
               r[j] = ui.getTabBounds(tabbedPane, j);
          //add a MouseMotionListener to detect when a mouse enters a tab
          tabbedPane.addMouseMotionListener(
               new MouseMotionAdapter() {
                    public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent e) {
                         for (int j = 0; j < 3; j++)
                         if (r[j].contains(e.getPoint()))
                              //put your code for changes here
                              System.out.println("inside a tab");
     public static void main(String args[]) {
          TabbedPaneExample tp = new TabbedPaneExample();
}Hope that helps