How do I use JPanel as a leaf in JTree ?

Question

Hi All,
I am a bit of a newbie and I've been trying to change the behavior of my application.
I have a JTree that I now want to change the rendering of a leaf to be a JPanel. The JPanel will have a couple of JButtons and some text and the user can interact with the JButtons. I was successful in creating the JPanel, adding the buttons and then making my own TreeCellRenderer. Everything displays fine, but the user can not interact with the JButtons, whenever I click on a button in the leaf, the whole leaf is highlighted - I suppose I should not be surprised because this is probably behaving just a cell in a JTree should.
So I searched the forums and used Google and have found several examples of people using JCheckBox as nodes/leaf(s) in a JTree but none with a JPanel as a leaf. I took one of the check box demos from here ( [http://www.coderanch.com/t/330630/Swing-AWT-SWT-JFace/java/add-swing-component-tree]) and then hacked it a bit but am stuck with the following error :
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ClassCastException: java.lang.String cannot be cast to javax.swing.JPanel
which is pointing to the line with JPanel temp2 = (JPanel) temp.getUserObject();
Does anyone have either some code or suggestions to accomplish a leaf as a JPanel with some buttons ?
Thanks in advance !
import javax.swing.*;*
*import javax.swing.tree.*;
import java.awt.event.*;*
*import java.awt.*;
public class treedemo1 extends JFrame {
    public treedemo1() {
        super("TreeDemo");
        setSize(1500, 1500);
        JPanel p = new JPanel();
        p.setLayout(new BorderLayout());
        customLeafPanel cp1 = new customLeafPanel();
        customLeafPanel cp2 = new customLeafPanel();
        customLeafPanel cp3 = new customLeafPanel();
        DefaultMutableTreeNode root = new DefaultMutableTreeNode("Query Results");
        DefaultMutableTreeNode n1 = new DefaultMutableTreeNode(cp1, false);
        DefaultMutableTreeNode n2 = new DefaultMutableTreeNode(cp2, false);
        DefaultMutableTreeNode n3 = new DefaultMutableTreeNode(cp3, false);
        root.add(n1);
        root.add(n2);
        root.add(n3);
        JTree tree = new JTree(root);
        p.add(tree, BorderLayout.NORTH);
        getContentPane().add(p);
        TestRenderer tr = new TestRenderer();
        tree.setEditable(false);
        tree.setCellRenderer(tr);
    public class customLeafPanel extends JPanel {
        public customLeafPanel() {
            JPanel clpPanel = new JPanel();
            JButton helloJButton = new JButton("Hello");
            this.add(helloJButton);
    public class TestRenderer implements TreeCellRenderer {
        transient protected Icon closedIcon;
        transient protected Icon openIcon;
        public TestRenderer() {
        public Component getTreeCellRendererComponent(JTree tree,
                Object value,
                boolean selected,
                boolean expanded,
                boolean leaf,
                int row,
                boolean hasFocus) {
            DefaultMutableTreeNode temp = (DefaultMutableTreeNode) value;
            JPanel temp2 = (JPanel) temp.getUserObject();
            return temp2;
        public void setClosedIcon(Icon newIcon) {
            closedIcon = newIcon;
        public void setOpenIcon(Icon newIcon) {
            openIcon = newIcon;
    public static void main(String args[]) {
        JFrame frame = new treedemo1();
        frame.addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter() {
            public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) {
                System.exit(0);
        frame.pack();
        frame.setVisible(true);
}

Answer 1

Thank you TBM and DB for your replies ! Adding TBM's code does indeed fix the JPanel issue and as TBM indicated this does not actually solve my ultimate problem (Can I give you each 1/2 the Duke points?)
As a newbie, I am still learning and DB pointed out that "You can however interact with an editor". So after reading the suggested tutorials and looking back at the example code that I hacked. I added the cellEditor back in and it WORKS ! Its funny, I deleted that bits of code from the example, assuming the cellEditor allows you to "edit" (ie change), not interact with it (symantics I guess)
Thanks again guys for pointing this newbie in the right direction. Frankly I am somewhat surprised that I could finally begin to read and understand what the tutorial and suggestions are telling me ! What is one step up from a newbie ?
unfortunately I can not post the code because the length of the message is > 5000 :(