Custom JFileChooser painting

Question

Hi all, still new at swing and customizing their look and have a few questions regarding customizing the painting of a JFileChooser. First I would like to change the gradients of the buttons. Is this possible? Usually I have gone about changing a components paintComponent method(as below). But I have no idea how to do this when trying to set the painting of a child component. Probably possible to loop also through the child components and find the buttons, but then what?
Second I had used a recursive method to set child jpanel components of a JOptionPane to set them opaque and allow the JOptionPanes new custom paint to show through. I tried to apply that to the JFileChooser and am left with an area at the bottom and left that are the default colors.
I have added statement to also change any JComponent to setOpaque(false), but this doesnt help. Any suggestions or help would be appreciated.
heres the sample and thanks again.
package filechoosertest;
import java.awt.Color;
import java.awt.Component;
import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.GradientPaint;
import java.awt.Graphics;
import java.awt.Graphics2D;
import java.awt.Insets;
import java.awt.RenderingHints;
import javax.swing.JComponent;
import javax.swing.JFileChooser;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.SwingUtilities;
public class TestFileChooser extends JFileChooser{
    private Color startColor1 = new Color(255,255,255);
    private Color endColor1 = new Color(207,212,206);
     public static void main(String[] args) {
        // TODO code application logic here
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable(){
            public void run() {
             TestFileChooser tfc = new TestFileChooser();
             tfc.showOpenDialog(null);
    public TestFileChooser(){
        super();
         mySetOpaque(this);
     protected void mySetOpaque(JComponent jcomp) {
        Component[] comps = jcomp.getComponents();
        for (Component c : comps) {
            System.err.println("Component class " + c.getClass().getName());
            if (c instanceof JPanel) {
                System.err.println("Setting opaque");
                ((JPanel) c).setOpaque(false);
                mySetOpaque((JComponent) c);
     public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
        Dimension dim = getSize();
        Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D) g;
        Insets inset = getInsets();
        int vWidth = dim.width - (inset.left + inset.right);
        int vHeight = dim.height - (inset.top + inset.bottom);
        paintGradient(g2, inset.left,
                inset.top, vWidth, vHeight, dim.height);
         private void paintGradient(Graphics2D g2d, int x, int y,
            int w, int h, int height) {
        g2d.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING,
                RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON);
        GradientPaint GP = new GradientPaint(0, h * 3 / 4, startColor1, 0, h, endColor1, false);
        g2d.setPaint(GP);
        g2d.setPaint(GP);
        g2d.fillRect(1, 1, w, h);
}

Answer 1

Your problem, I think, is that you are not setting the opaque on JPanels nested within other JPanels. a small recursive routine should fix this:
  public MyOptionPane(Object message, int messageType, int optionType,
      Icon icon, Object[] options, Object initialValue) {
    super(message, messageType, optionType, icon, options, initialValue);
    mySetOpaque(this);
  private void mySetOpaque(JComponent jcomp)
    Component[] comps = jcomp.getComponents();
    for (Component c : comps) {
      if (c instanceof JPanel) {
        ((JPanel)c).setOpaque(false);
        mySetOpaque((JPanel)c);
  }