Having picked up a mouse event, pass it to parent component.

Question

This is further to my table cell hover, which is otherwise working.
I track the mouse accross the table using an invisible child component, and when the mouse leaves it, move the child onto the new cell position.
The problem is that, while the mouse is over the invisible component, that component is grabbing all the mouse events. My table also wants to detect mouse events (though it's interested in clicks).
The obvious thing is, after they've been dealt with and the child component level, to transfer the events to the table (having mapped the mouse coordinates). However all the processEvents methods in components like JTable are protected.
I suppose I could extend JTable and add a method to get arround protected, but that's nasty, especially since a lot of my JTables are already subclassed.

Answer 1

I had to do just this. I have JLabel's in a JPanel. The JPanel is in a LayeredPane. When I mouse over the JLabels, they grab the mouse events... which I don't want. I want the LayeredPane to get it.
So in the JLabel, I do:
      * Don't send to parent what you don't have to. Things like tooltips will
      * be broken if this is not handled carefully...
     public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e) { }
     public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent e) { }
     public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent e) { }
     public void mouseExited(MouseEvent e) { }
     public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent e) { machine.dispatchToParent(e);}
     public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent e) { machine.dispatchToParent(e);}
     public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) { machine.dispatchToParent(e);}(the "machine" above is a JPanel). Now in the JPanel, aka "machine", I do:
Point point; int comp_x, comp_y; // for component with respect to this machine
public void dispatchToParent(MouseEvent e) {
     point=((JComponent)e.getSource()).getLocation();
     //System.out.println("Dispatching: " + e.getX() + " " + e.getY());
     //System.out.println("Component position: " + ((JComponent)(e.getSource())).getLocation());
     if (e.getButton() > 0) MsgIFrame.println("ME at: " + comp_x + "," + comp_y + " button: " + e.getButton() );
     if (e.getButton() > 1) {
          popup(e);
          return;
     comp_x=(int)point.getX(); comp_y=(int)point.getY();
     comp_x+=this.getX(); comp_y+=this.getY();
     e.translatePoint(comp_x, comp_y);
     room.getLayeredPane().dispatchEvent(e);
}Above, the "room" is a JInternalFrame with a LayeredPane inside it, as you can see. I do a little translating so the LayeredPane gets the event in its coordinate space, not those of its Components.