Using the swing clipboard and DefaultEditorKit.copytAction

Question

Hi all
Ive heard that i can use the swing DefaultEditorKit to basically copy and paste text throughout my application (like using Ctrl+C ctrl+V)
basically i have a number of elements such as textpanes and edit boxes and i want to be able to copy and paste text between them with the least amount of effort, most examples i have seen about implementing copy and paste require you to specify the elements that you need to copy and paste from
i dont want to have to specify every element, i just want a simple action that says copy the selected text, and paste the selected text (dont have to worry about cut really)
Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V both do this natrually, but how do i call a simple method that does the same thing that the keystrokes do.
I just want two menu items that when i invoke their click listeenrs to say something like
copylistener{
copy();
Ive seen a few examples of the swing methods but these also seem to need to invoke actions on the elements that you want to copy and paste between, but the keystroke dont need any of this

Answer 1

Sorry, I see your confusion now.
Yes, you need a few helper methods to get the actual Action, but you don't need to do this for every text component because the Action is shared by all text components.
Text components use an EditorKit. The editor kit provides support for basic functionality of each text component. (ie. cursor movement, text selection, cut, copy, paste...). The EditorKit uses Actions to implement the basic support. Each Action extends TextAction which contains a method "getFocusedComponent" which returns the last text component that currently has focus. (clicking on a menu item is only a temporary loss of focus).
So the code in the TextComponentDemo is being very efficient and is reusing the static Action that was created by the DefaultEditorKit. So even though your form may have multiple text components, you only need to create your menu item once using any text component.
If you don't want your code to reuse the existing Actions, you can create your own Action directly from the EditorKit. Then this Action can be used to create a JMenuItem or JButton. Here is a simple example of using this approach:
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?forumID=57&threadID=302962