How to highlight drop destination

Question

I have an application that allows the user to categorize items by dragging them to a list of categories, represented by simple textual labels. The drag and drop functionality works fine; but it's difficult for the user to see which category is the drop target, since there seems to be no faclity in Swing to highlight a drop target in real time.
Some of the buit-in objects do on the fly highlighting-- for example, you can see where your data will be dropped via a moving insertion point in a JTextField object-- but I don't see anything I can override or implement to provide this capability more generally.
I tried setting a MouseMotionListener on the drop targets, but you don't get mouse events during a drag (at least they were never called).
I can't believe there's no ability in Swing to do this. What am I overlooking?

Answer 1

I am not aware of anyhting, except maybe in Release 6 I think they might be adding stuff, but if you're implementing d'n'd yourself, you have the ability to register a DropTargetListener which can do the highlighting. Here are some of the methods of one I wrote a long time ago:     public void dragEnter(DropTargetDragEvent dtde) {
          ViewMediator.getInstance().highlightViewContainer(dtde.getLocation());
     public void dragOver(DropTargetDragEvent dtde) {
          ViewMediator.getInstance().highlightViewContainer(dtde.getLocation());
     public void dropActionChanged(DropTargetDragEvent dtde) {
     public void dragExit(DropTargetEvent e) {
          ViewMediator.getInstance().highlightViewContainer(null);
     }In general terms you highlight according to the location of the mouse pointer within your droptarget (via getLocation()).
Regards,
Tim