Dispatching events...

Question

Hi,
I am working on a project for a system that will not have a mouse. Ideally I would like the screen to function almost like a video game would -- even though it is not a game. By this I mean that all keystrokes are handled at the window level and dispatched to the correct component depending on the keystroke.
Currently I have inhibited the ability of components on the form to gain focus. When I press a key, the listener associated with the JFrame responds... I then attmpt to use dispatchEvent inside of a case statement to route events to the proper components (In this case a JTextField) The problem is, is that allthough the dispatchEvent call is made, the JTextField doesn't do anything with it. I am just typing characters so I would expect all these keystrokes to show up in the JTextField, but it does not work.
Does anybody know why this might not work?
-Benjamin

Answer 1

Here is a code snippet that actually seems to work. The problem was that I was dispatching a keyPressed event rather than a keyTyped.
import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import java.awt.*;
class NoFocus extends JFrame implements KeyListener {
   private class JTextFieldNF extends JTextField {
      public JTextFieldNF(int size) {
         super(size);
      public boolean isFocusTraversable() {
         return false;
   JTextFieldNF tfnf;
     public NoFocus() {
      tfnf = new JTextFieldNF(20);
      getContentPane().setLayout(new FlowLayout());
      getContentPane().add(tfnf);
      addKeyListener(this);
     public void keyPressed(KeyEvent evt) {
   public void keyTyped(java.awt.event.KeyEvent evt) {
      switch (evt.getKeyCode()) {
         // Route up and down key somewhere else
         case KeyEvent.VK_UP:
         case KeyEvent.VK_DOWN:
            break;
         // All keystrokes not expicitly used are piped to tfnf
         default:
                  tfnf.dispatchEvent(evt);
   public void keyReleased(java.awt.event.KeyEvent A) {
     public static void main(String args[])
          JFrame frame = new NoFocus();
          frame.setDefaultCloseOperation( EXIT_ON_CLOSE );
          frame.setSize(200,200);
          frame.setVisible(true);