Proper tray icon iconify/bring to front behavior

Question

Hi, I have a small but annoying problem with JDIC tray icons and JFrame. Maybe there's some really simple solution for this but I can't see it.
My app has one JFrame and a TrayIcon for it. Currently, a click to tray icon iconifies the frame when it's visible, and a click to tray deiconifies the frame when it's iconified. Simple enough, but my problem comes when I try to make the behavior a little more user-friendly: when the frame is visible, a click to to tray should bring it to the front IF it's not the topmost window - and iconify only when it's the topmost window.
The problem is, that when I click the tray icon - the JFrame loses it's focus and my code just always brings the frame on top.
Here's my code (Workbench contains a JFrame):
tray.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
               public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
                    Workbench workbench = app.getWorkbench();
                    if (workbench.isIconified()) {
                         if (!workbench.isVisible()) {
                              workbench.setVisible(true);
                         workbench.deiconify();
                         workbench.toFront();
                    } else {
// here's the problem
                         if (workbench.isFocused()) {
                              workbench.iconify();
                         } else {
                              workbench.toFront();
          });I thought about somekind of timer hack, that would check the time since the frame lost focus and compare it to current time when I press the tray icon, but that's an ugly solution - and some users might hold the button down longer than others.
Another would be to ask the topmost OS window with JNI (afaik. there is no such method in Java?)
btw. I just tried how mIRC does this, and it seems to get stuck to the "toFront()-state" too, when I set some another window to an "always-on-top"-mode. So I guess it's not the most ideal solution to ask the OS for the topmost window - but that would still do it for me.
Anyone have other ideas ?
Message was edited by:
finalfrontier

Answer 1

I am very interested in implementing just such a thing with my Java application. I am in the starting phases of this project and ran across your post in my search for info.
How much do you already have implemented? I.E., can you display the icon but are just having trouble catching the events for when the icon is clicked? Or do you not even have the ability to display the icon yet? I have found the Windows documentation on the MSDN site for the shell function Shell_NotifyIcon(), which is what we want to use but I have not begun any attempts to use it yet.
If you (or anyone else) have any info or have had any success at all with this yet, I would be very interested in hearing how it works. I'll be happy to share any info I find, when/if I get that far.
Thanks,
j