What is the right way to change the active JInternalFrame for and MDI app?

Question

I am working on my own implementation of the window menu. The action that is triggered when a customer chooses a window to activate from the list in the menu is not behaving as I expected. The code I wrote (below) switches frames correctly but the caption bar never gets updated and if you restore a frame from an icon the frame is not correctly activated, there is even a restore button which if you push fixes things up and the frame then behaves normally     if (frameToActivate.isIcon ())  {
          //  Restore from icon
          desktopPane().getDesktopManager().deiconifyFrame (frameToActivate);
     desktopPane().getDesktopManager().activateFrame (frameToActivate);
     desktopPane().setSelectedFrame (frameToActivate);I did a search of the web and found a tip on JavaWorld (http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-05-2001/jw-0525-mdi.html) which led me to try doing this from a different angle - the JInternalFrame's point of view. This code works     try {
          if (frameToActivate.isIcon ())  {
               //  Restore from icon
               frameToActivate.setIcon (false);
          frameToActivate.moveToFront();
          frameToActivate.setSelected (true);
     } catch (PropertyVetoException error) {
          error.printStackTrace();
     }My question is why does the desktop based approach not work? If methods exist that appear to let you restore and switch between frames why are the ineffective? Am I missing something obvious that I should be doing?
If using the JInternalFrame methods is the right way to go then I will It just seems like if the DesktopManager has methods that advertise that is supports managing the active frame then they should work. Before I ignore them I want to check with you to see if there is a right way to use them.
Ian

Answer 1

So, this is another batch of duke dollars I cannot assign - since I solved my own problem:-)
I had an epiphany and tried setting break points to see what code was executed when you click on an inactive frame. From that I determined that DefaultDesktopManager.activateFrame, as implemented, does not activate the frame but acknowledges the activation of a frame and does a small amount of bookeeping work for the DesktopManager. So, the solution is the code I wrote to switch focus using the JInternalFrame's methods. Since I did not want to have to write those nine lines of code in the couple of places I want to programmatically switch the active frame I added a get/setActiveFrame method to my JDesktopPane derivative. In case others face this problem here is the code (warning I have not yet setup building the JavaDocs for this project so I cannot vouch for the validity of the JavaDoc, but the code does work):/**
* Bring frameToActivate to the front (restoring from icon if neccessary) and make it the
* selected frame.  This method does all the things required to switch the active frame for
* an MDI application unlike: @link JDesktopPane.setSelectedFrame, which does not change the
* focus; @link javax.swing.DefaultDesktopManager.activateFrame which does not correctly
* handle iconified frames or switch the focus properly; and
* @link javax.swing.JInternalFramesetSelected which also does not handle iconified frames.
* @param frameToActivate the frame to bring to the front and become the active window
* @throws IllegalArgumentException
public void setActiveFrame (JInternalFrame frameToActivate) throws IllegalArgumentException  {
    if (frameToActivate == null)
        throw new IllegalArgumentException ("setActiveFrame a frame must be passed a non null valie.");
    try {
        if (frameToActivate.isIcon ())  {
            //  Restore from icon
            frameToActivate.setIcon (false);
        frameToActivate.moveToFront();
        frameToActivate.setSelected (true);
    } catch (PropertyVetoException error) {
* This method returns the currently active frame.  This method returns the same frame
* as <code>getSelectedFrame</code> and is provided for symetry for <code>setActiveFrame</code>. 
* @return the currently active frame
* @see LDesktopPane.setActiveFrame
* @see javax.swing.JDesktopPane.getSelectedFrame
public JInternalFrame getActiveFrame ()  {
    return getSelectedFrame ();
}IL