"locking" all UI objects but one...

Question

I need my user to "draw" on a graph to get some information.
Ie, the user presses a button, then the graph goes into "drawing mode" and the user draws a line and I save this information.
The problem is, its going not going to be very obvious what to do. I thought it would be good to have the graph pop into a dialog box, but that would be a real pain because its pretty embedded into the frame... I was wondering if there would be some way to "lock" UI elements in a frame (much like when you open a dialog) but leave one "unlocked"
That way I can draw a bright border round the graph and lock everything untill the user draws on it. Otherwise they might just not touch the graph untill later and really not expect it to start drawing lines etc...
If anyone has a better idea than "locking" the rest of the objects I would be happy to take suggestions...
Thanks!
Edit - I'm really not sure how to approach this even if I didn't lock the UI.
I call a method in the graph (see below). For the behavior I want I would have to somehow wait for the user to finish adding the mouse events before returning?
public int[] getDragInformation()
          //here I need to wait for the user to trigger mouse events on teh graph
          return coordinates;
     }Would just having some kind of flag for when the mouse events were input work? Would I have to have a loop like this:
     public double[] getDragInformation()
          startGettingDragInformation();
          while (gettingDragInformation)
               try
                    Thread.sleep(100);
               } catch (InterruptedException e)
                    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                    e.printStackTrace();
          return dragInformation;
     }Edited by: hanvyj on 25-Mar-2011 03:59

Answer 1

I'm trying to do the wait think in my first post but the events dont trigger, they just stack up and happen when the loop/wait ends. Is there any way to give them a chance while its waiting?
I have improved it to use wait and notify. stopGettingDragInformation is called in the mouseListener, which should be running off the event dispatch thread. My conclusion is that waitingDragThread is running off the EDT, which makes sense because it happens after a button press, but I'm unsure how to not run it off the EDT...
public int[] getDragInformation()
          startGettingDragInformation();
          waitingDragThread = Thread.currentThread();
          try
               synchronized(waitingDragThread)
                    waitingDragThread.wait();
          } catch (InterruptedException e)
               // TODO Auto-generated catch block
               e.printStackTrace();
          return dragInformation;
        private void stopGettingDragInformation()
          gettingDragInformation = false;
          synchronized(waitingDragThread)
               waitingDragThread.notify();
annotherEdit Well, that chucks my theory out of the window, you get a "Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.Error: Cannot call invokeAndWait from the event dispatcher thread" if you run it from the EDT so i can't be...
Edited by: hanvyj on 25-Mar-2011 05:09
Edited by: hanvyj on 25-Mar-2011 05:16