Making a JButton react like a JMenu

Question

Hi everybody,
I'm really not sure if this is possible; if it isn't, feel free to tell me. Anyway, I have a JMenuBar with multiple JMenus, interspersed with JButtons. The JButtons replace JMenus with no JMenuItems, so you can just click on them and have something come up. I've figured out how to make a JButton look like a JMenu, but the problem is that when scrolling over the JButton, it doesn't get the selected look of a JMenu (with the highlighting). I know this would be done by using mouseEntered and mouseExited in a MouseListener, so I don't need help there, but I'm getting tripped up on how to change the look of the button properly. I'd like it to change to the default of whatever system it's running on (Windows, Mac, Linux), so I can't use UIManager, I don't think.
I don't need help making a program work (because my buttons are already fine in the JMenuBar, even though they don't do what I want), just some advice, so if anyone would be willing, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks,
Jezzica85

Answer 1

Here's my test code:
import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JMenu;
import javax.swing.JMenuBar;
import javax.swing.JMenuItem;
public class MenuTest {
     public MenuTest() {
          try {
               JFrame frame = new JFrame();
               frame.setSize( 200, 200 );
               frame.setDefaultCloseOperation( JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE );
               JMenuBar bar = new JMenuBar();
               JMenu menu1 = new JMenu( "one" );
               JMenuItem item = new JMenuItem( "Blah" );
               JMenuItem item2 = new JMenuItem( "Blah2" );
               menu1.add( item );
               menu1.add( item2 );
               bar.add( menu1 );
               JMenuItem button = new JMenuItem( "button" );
               bar.add( button );
               JMenu menu2 = new JMenu( "two" );
               JMenuItem itemA = new JMenuItem( "Blah" );
               JMenuItem item2A = new JMenuItem( "Blah2" );
               menu2.add( itemA );
               menu2.add( item2A );
               bar.add( menu2 );
               frame.add( bar, BorderLayout.NORTH );
               frame.setVisible( true );
          } catch( Exception e ) {
               e.printStackTrace();
               System.exit( -1 );
     public static void main(String[] args) { new MenuTest(); }
}What happens to me in this is that the two JMenus are sized fine, but the JMenuItem extends as far as it can, so the second JMenu is against the far side of the JMenuBar.
Thanks,
Jezzica85