Disabling events for a container and its children

Question

I've stumbled across this one and don't currently have time to find a full solution, so just wondering if anyone else has implemented the same...
I have a class which extends JPanel and adds a "wait(boolean)" method - when called with 'true' this kicks off a Timer which repaints with an animated overlay until it is called again with 'false.' The overlay is simply painted, it's not an actual component.
All well and good so far.
However, what I'd like to do is also disable mouse/key/etc events within that panel. Let's say one of the components which it contains is a table - I don't want the user to be able to change the selected row whilst the panel is in 'wait mode.'
Since Swing uses a bubble-up event model, this isn't trivial - the on-liner solutions such as calling setEnabled() or overriding processEvent() won't work because the component itself doesn't actually receive the events.
So, the solutions off the top of my head are,
1. when wait is called, lock and traverse the tree and disable/enable all the components within it - not a good solution as this disrupts the state of the components and even if a map is maintained, and changes to the hierarchy during wait mode will cause trouble
2. use the panel as a container for a wrapped panel plus an overlay which is only visible during wait mode, delegate various methods to the wrapped panel - I don't like this as it means overriding a whole truckload of methods and it feels fragile
3. when wait is called, inject an overlay panel into the component tree - I don't like this either as it means understanding the panel's context in its parent (eg it might be the center of a BorderLayout or it might be the left component in a JSplitPane) and it also has obvious implications for events such as ComponentEvent on the children
4. wrap a panel as per 2 and instead of delegating, simply provide a "getPanel()" method to obtain it - perfectly functional but utterly ugly and it allows people to easily and comprehensively break the behaviour if they wish
I can't help feeling there's something obvious I'm missing :o) ...I'm thinking more along the lines of a composition model rather than extension now, but I think I fundamentally still have similar issues.
Anyone got any ideas?

Answer 1

I've had a chance to play with this now and I had a pop at using the JLayeredPane, throwing a component to the top which is a MouseListener and KeyListener and consume()s all the events. Works fine for the most part, until there's a JButton within the component - they manage to carry on handling events despite the consuming component over the top of them. Hover over them and they repaint, they're clickable, and so on. Hmm.