Overlapping components problem

Question

Hello,
I have been developing an applet for Quickplaces. Basically it shows what is happening in the Quickplace from different kind of views. A view from a document where people can see who has been viewing it for example. Or a view from a member where one can see what documents the member wrote.
Now I have chosen to implement a sort of circle visualisation for this. In the center is the object the view is about, a document, a member, etc. Outwards are other objects. In the case of a document view, the members that responded to it, in a circle more outward: members that viewed it. Etc. It's sort of a dartboard.
I have written a custom layoutmanager for each view for this. A problem I have encountered is that once I tell a member or document component to let itself be placed by the layout managerr I get a fixed size component. It looks ok until you for example hover over it, wich I have keyed to a zooming in on details method. When you do that your usually overlapping other components. Why, components can be overlapped without zooming in some views. The problem is the mouselistener I have attached fires when I hover over de component size. Not the size of the actual graphical representation. My members for example are represented by a sphere. They are bounded by a rectangle component though. So if I enter my mouse anywhere near the sphere... it already zooms in, resulting in the user zooming in on a member, but actually he wanted to zoom in on a member that was close to this one, but for the code was "underneath" the component of the other member.
It's a bit hard to explain without posting a screenshot.
How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Hi,
I need a clarification, taking the example you
provided:
you have a rectangle components, that display spheres.I have a viewer class for document's member's and room's. RoomViewer, MemberViewer, etc. These paint the actual graphic. They are given a size by the custom layoutmanager i wrote like this:
        //Layout members
        int mems = members.size();
        if(mems != 0){
            double angle = 360 / mems;
            double baseAngle = 0;
            synchronized(members){
                 Iterator iter = members.iterator();
                 while(iter.hasNext()){
                     MemberViewer tempMember = (MemberViewer)iter.next();
                     Dimension d = tempMember.getSize();
                     double lastLog = tempMember.getMember().getLastLog() * 160 + Math.sqrt((Math.pow(50, (double)2) + Math.pow(50, (double)2)));
                     int xCoord = (int)((xCenter + (Math.cos(Math.toRadians(baseAngle)) * lastLog)) - (0.5 * d.getWidth()));
                     int yCoord = (int)((yCenter + (Math.sin(Math.toRadians(baseAngle)) * lastLog)) - (0.5 * d.getHeight()));
                     tempMember.setBounds(xCoord, yCoord, container_size, container_size);
                     baseAngle += angle;
        }A viewer get's it's data from the model class. MemberViewer from Member, etc.
First you want to zoom only when the mouse is hovered
on the sphere. Is that right ?Yes I have implemented the enters part of the mouselistener. As soon as the mouse enters the component in wich the graphical representation is drawn it zooms. with zoom I multiply the size by some and add some different graphs inside the circle, but that is not important. What is interesting is probably that the size of the component when it is not zoomed is the size for when it is zoomed in, or the zoom in would be cut off by the component boundaries.
What about the overlapping ? could you clarify a bit
please.
Basically it overlaps nicely on the view. Once you interact though I get stuck. Clicking, entering and exiting is supposed to do things. But all these 3 fire when your mouse does that thing inside the component, not inside the graphical representation. So you start zooming quite a bit away from the circle of a member btw, because that distance is already part of the component, but not of the drawing.
Who is reponsible for drawing the shapes ?The Viewers paint themselves. The Layoutmanager gives them a basic place to start their own painting and a View class controls the layoutmanager.
And who listens to mouse motion ?The viewers themselves do. They implement mouseListener.
in mouseMoved(MouseEvent e)
you can get the point with e.getPoint(); where the
mouse points to.
This will help you to handle the event only when
hovered on the shape,
but it will maybe not solve the hovering over
overlapped components.I don't quite follow that. A Shape can still not implement MouseListener.