Event handling with multiple panels

Question

Hi there,
Like many here, I'm very new to this stuff so please bear with me..
I've been building a gui, using a main "parent" JPanel and several
subpanels. The main reason for creating subpanels was to help me
with the layout (someone might let me know if this was a bad idea!).
Now, all of the subpanels generate events in one form or another. What I'd
like to do is find out the best way to handle ALL of the events that
can be generated from my various subpanels from the "parent" panel. Hopefully
this makes sense :) Could anyone offer any suggestions as to the best way
to achieve this?
For example, panel1 is a JPanel contains a slider and a button.
multipanel is another JPanel that contains 6 panel1's. finally
the main (parent) panel contains the multipanel.
So, a program that creates an instance of the parent panel wants to know
the value that one of the sliders on one of the panels in the multipanel
has (!). How does it get the value?
I hope I explained myself! Many thanks in advance for any advice offered,
dan

Answer 1

class InnerPanel extends JPanel {
Vector listeners;
public void add(SwingEventListener lsnr) {
listeners.add(lsnr);
protected void notifyListeners(AWTEvent ev) {
for (Iterator i = listeners.iterator();i.hasNext();) {
SwingEventListener lsnr = (SwingEventListener) i.next();
lsnr.eventPeformed(ev);
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ev) {
notifyListener(ev);
Your SwingEventListener will be
interface SwingEventListener {
public void eventPefromed(AWTEvent event);
public ParentPanel extends JPanel implements SwingEventListener {
public void eventPerformed(AWTEvent event) {
... do what is required.