Tooltips for custom buttons

Question

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide...
To represent roads on a map as mouse-overable, clickable buttons, I extended JComponent, added the instances to a layer in JLayeredPane, and registered each instance as a Mouse- and MouseMotionListener on an invisible JPanel ("mousePanel") which resides at the top level of the JLayeredPane. There are some other layers above the road layer (but below the mousePanel).
What's the best (simplest?) way to implement Tool Tips for the road-buttons. Each button's bounds, and the bounds of components in the higher layers are set to the bounds of the JLayeredPane, so the ToolTipManager can't "hear" mouseEvents from the buttons themselves--they're blocked.
I don't think I can extend the ToolTipManager (e.g., to have it also listen to the mousePanel) without messing up its behavior elsewhere in the UI, where there are other conventional components that also use tooltips, since the ToolTipManager is a singleton.
I tried firing new mouseEntered and mouseExited events from the mouseEntered/mouseExited methods in the road buttons, but the ToolTipManager didn't respond to those either. Here are the key pieces, cleaned up for simplicity:
public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent e) {
     if ( !e.isConsumed() ) {
                //outline is a Shape representing the road, offset &
                //dim create a rectangle around the mouse.  The event
                //must be consumed to ensure only one road is selected at a time
          if ( outline.intersects( e.getX()-offset, e.getY()-offset, dim, dim )) {
               e.consume();
               setActive(true, e);
               repaint();
               return;
     setActive(false, e);
     repaint();
public void setActive(boolean b, MouseEvent e) {
     //fire a PropertyChangeEvent if there's been a change--
     if ( active==b ) return;
     this.active = b;
     if ( clickable ) {
          changer.firePropertyChange("active", !b, b);
          if ( b ) {
               mouseEntered(e);
               return;
          mouseExited(e);
public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent e) {
     new MouseEvent(this, MouseEvent.MOUSE_ENTERED,e.getWhen(),e.getModifiers(),e.getX(), e.getY(),0, false);
public void mouseExited(MouseEvent e) {
     new MouseEvent(this, MouseEvent.MOUSE_EXITED,e.getWhen(),e.getModifiers(),e.getX(), e.getY(),0, false);

Answer 1

Just wondering if it would be possible to register a MouseMotionListener on your mousePanel that, on mouseMoved, could search the components below it for the top-most button and then set the mousePanel's own toolTipText to match the button's toolTipText. Perhaps SwingUtilities.getDeepestComponentAt() (or something similar) would help. Maybe have a look through the RootPane tutorial (especially the section on the GlassPane) for a similar situation.
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/components/rootpane.html