Fire a left click when the right button is pressed

Question

I am working on a small program with a text area and mouse functionality. I have all my listeners in place but I need one additional feature and I am unsure how to go about implementing it. I want to be able to fire a left click when the right button is pressed.
The reason is because right clicking does not move the caret around the text area. I need to be able to move the caret with a right click so I can then invoke another method to do some other functionality that is associated with the right click. Any method is acceptable as long as a right click will result in the caret being able to move to a location much like a left click can.
all help is appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is "better", and my guess is that it isn't, but how about using a Robot object here to create a left mouse press and release? For instance,
import java.awt.AWTException;
import java.awt.Robot;
import java.awt.event.InputEvent;
import java.awt.event.MouseAdapter;
import java.awt.event.MouseEvent;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.JComponent;
import javax.swing.JScrollPane;
import javax.swing.JTextArea;
public class RightClickAsLeft
  private JPanel mainPanel = new JPanel();
  private JTextArea area = new JTextArea(20, 50);
  private Robot robot;
  public RightClickAsLeft()
    try
      robot = new Robot();
    catch (AWTException e)
      // TODO Auto-generated catch block
      e.printStackTrace();
    mainPanel.add(new JScrollPane(area));
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    for (int i = 0; i < 18; i++)
      for (int j = 0; j < 80; j++)
        sb.append((char)(40 + j));
      sb.append("\n");
    area.setText(sb.toString());
    area.addMouseListener(new MyMouseListener());
  public JComponent getComponent()
    return mainPanel;
  private class MyMouseListener extends MouseAdapter
    @Override
    public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e)
      int button = e.getButton();
      if (button == MouseEvent.BUTTON3)
        if (robot != null)
          robot.mousePress(InputEvent.BUTTON1_MASK);
          robot.mouseRelease(InputEvent.BUTTON1_MASK);
  private static void createAndShowUI()
    JFrame frame = new JFrame("RightClickAsLeft");
    frame.getContentPane().add(new RightClickAsLeft().getComponent());
    frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
    frame.pack();
    frame.setLocationRelativeTo(null);
    frame.setVisible(true);
  public static void main(String[] args)
    java.awt.EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable()
      public void run()
        createAndShowUI();
}Edited by: Encephalopathic on Apr 10, 2009 9:59 AM