Table Cell Renderer Problem

Question

I've created a JTable and filled it with data. I created my own header renderer so that I could have more control over the font of the header. I did the same with the cells of the table. Before I created the cell renderer, the cell and row selection (the highlighting of the selections) worked fine. Once I created and implemented the cell renderer, I can set the font the way I want, but the cell no longer highlights the selected rows. It's selecting the rows (my System.out.println in getTableCellRendererComponent() comes back with data). I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Here's some of the code....
runTable = new JTable(tableModel);
runTable.setBackground(Color.white);
runTable.setSelectionMode(ListSelectionModel.SINGLE_INTERVAL_SELECTION);
CellRenderer cellRenderer = new CellRenderer();
// Set column 1's header
String[] header1 = {"Time"," Of ","Day"};
TableColumn col1 = runTable.getColumnModel().getColumn(0);
col1.setHeaderValue(header1);
col1.setCellRenderer(cellRenderer);
String[][] parms = zoomplot.zmenubar.getParmSel();
TableColumn col;
for (int i = 0; i < parms.length; i++) {
String[] header = new String[3];
header[0] = parms[0];
header[1] = " (" + parms[i][1] + ") ";
header[2] = "Rate " + parms[i][2];
col= runTable.getColumnModel().getColumn(i + 1);
col.setHeaderValue(header);
// col.setMaxWidth(100);
col.setCellRenderer(cellRenderer);
class CellRenderer extends JLabel
implements TableCellRenderer {
Color background = null;
public CellRenderer() {
// setLayout(new BoxLayout(this, BoxLayout.Y_AXIS));
// setOpaque(false);
public Component getTableCellRendererComponent(
JTable table, Object value,
boolean isSelected, boolean hasFocus,
     int row, int col) {
removeAll();
invalidate();
add(Box.createVerticalGlue());
setText((String)value);
setFont(Utils.courierBold11);
setHorizontalAlignment(SwingConstants.CENTER);
setAlignmentX((float)0.5);
if (isSelected) {
this.setBackground(Color.black);
// System.out.println("Row " + row + ", Col " + col + " is selected");
return this;
public void setBackground(Color back) {
background = back;
super.setBackground(back);
I even tried to "manually" set the highlighting in getTableCellRendererComponent() ...
if (isSelected) {
this.setBackground(Color.black);
but that didn't work either. Any Ideas..... Thanks.....

Answer 1

When creating a custom renderer it is generally easier to extend the DefaultTableCellRenderer as it already has the custom code to do row highlighting, border selection etc. Also it has been optimized to paint faster.
In your particular case it looks like your don't even need to do that. Just create a DefaultTableCellRenderer and change a few of its properties. Something like:
// Override default renderer for a specific column
DefaultTableCellRenderer centerRenderer = new DefaultTableCellRenderer();
centerRenderer.setHorizontalAlignment( JLabel.CENTER );
centerRenderer.setFont(...);
table.getColumnModel().getColumn(2).setCellRenderer( centerRenderer );