Default Focus to Button

Question

Hi,
I have around 10 controls on my JDialog and Edit-F2 (Caption on JButton)
is one of them. Other components are disabled except the Edit-F2 button.
Now my Problem is when the Dialog pop's up on Pressing F2 the funtionality
associated with edit button should be executed. I am unable to set the
focus of the first time on Edit-F2 button. I tried grabFocus (),
requestFocus (), requestDefaultFocus (). I have implemented the keylisteners
also.
Please help. Thanks in advance.
-regards
deena

Answer 1

Hello,
There is one important thing to know about Swing and the focus management :
The focus manager sets automatically the focus on the first component of the Frame that as the focus.
If this first component is a container, it sets the focus on the first component of this container.
And if this component is also a container that contains other components, it sets the focus on the first of them.
Etc...
So, if you want a button to be the default button of a container, use the add(Component comp, int index), or the add(Component comp, Object constraints, int index) with index set to 0. You should do the same with the parent component of your button. Here is an example with a panel :
   JFrame frame = new JFrame("test") ;
   JPanel panel0 = new JPanel() ;
   panel0.add(new JButton("button 1"));
   panel0.add(new JButton("button 2"));
   JPanel panel1 = new JPanel() ;
   panel1.add(new JButton("button 3")) ;
   panel1.add(new JButton("default button"),0);
   frame.getContentPane().add(panel0) ;
   frame.getContentPane().add(panel1 , 0 );Running this code you should not need to call requestFocus nor any other method to set the focus on "default button".
Do not forget to set some constraints on your components to layout them correctly...