Event Handling Techniques with MVC

Question

Hello all,
I have a situation where I have a model that can be thought of like a graph with many nodes and edges. I would like to create a view of this model with a customized JLabel that shows a data value for each node and edge in the model. The event handling to accomplish this has left me a bit perplexed, though. On one hand I was considering something similar to the following:
// a dedicated listener for each label
MyLabel mylabels[] = new MyLabel[numLabels];
for(int i = 0; i != mylabels.length; i++){
MyEventHandler eh = new MyEventHandler(mylabels);
mylabel.addMouseListener(eh);
public class MyEventHandler extends MouseAdapter{
private MyLabel label;
public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e){
label.setText(etc...);
// at this point I would want to set the value of the point or edge
// that this label corresponds to, not sure of the best strategy
// here either
etc...
The other technique that I am considering might look similar to the following:
// only one listener for all labels
MyLabel mylabels[] = new MyLabel[numLabels];
MyEventHandler eh = new MyEventHandler();
for(int i = 0; i != mylabels.length; i++){ 
mylabel.addMouseListener(eh);
public class MyEventHandler extends MouseAdapter{
public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e){
//call a control object in MVC architecture, for more processing
control.update(e.getSource(), (String)input);
etc...
// in the control object class
public void update(Object eventSource, String input){
MyLabel source = (MyLabel)eventSource;
source.setText(input);
// the label would have some kind of index to indicate which one it is
model.setData(source.getIndex(), input);
I am interested in knowing any accepted/popular solutions to situations like this. Are either of my samples worth implementing? I would greatly appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.

Answer 1

I would recommend creating a single listener and add it to every label added to the graph. If you're interested in events that occur outside of the labels (in the background), add a listener to the container of the labels as well.
Unfortunately, you cannot simply add a listener to the container and get all the mouse events from the container's children because Swing's event dispatching system will only dispatch mouse events to a container if the click location was not within any of the container's children. This means that mouse listeners registered to a container will only receive mouse events within the container's background.