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Listeners Supported by Swing Components

You can tell what kinds of events a component can fire by looking at the kinds of event listeners you can register on it. For example, the Component class defines these listener registration methods:

• addComponentListener
• addFocusListener
• addKeyListener
• addMouseListener
• addMouseMotionListener

Thus, every component supports component, focus, key, mouse, and mouse-motion listeners. However, a component fires only those events for which listeners have registered on it. For example, if a mouse listener is registered on a particular component, but the component has no other listeners, then the component will fire only mouse events--no component, focus, key, or mouse-motion events.

Listeners supported by Swing components fall into two categories:

• Listeners that All Swing Components Support
• Other Listeners that Swing Components Support

Because all Swing components descend from the AWT Component class, you can register the following listeners on any Swing component:

component listener

Listens for changes in the component's size, position, or visibility.

focus listener

Listens for whether the component gained or lost the ability to receive keyboard input.

key listener

Listens for key presses; key events are fired only by the component that has the current keyboard focus.

mouse events

Listens for mouse clicks and mouse movement into or out of the component's drawing area.

mouse-motion events

Listens for changes in the cursor's position over the component.

All Swing components descend from the AWT Container class, but many of them aren't used as containers. So, technically speaking, any Swing component can fire container events, which notify listeners that a component has been added to or removed from the container. Realistically speaking, however, only containers (such as panels and frames) and compound components (such as combo boxes) fire container events.

JComponent provides support for three more listener types. You can register an ancestor listener to be notified when a component's containment ancestors are added to or removed from a container, hidden, made visible, or moved. This listener type is an implementation detail and can generally be ignored. Swing components are JavaBeans-compliant. Among other things, this means that Swing Components support bound and constrained properties and notify listeners of changes to the properties. Property change listeners listen for changes to bound properties and vetoable change listeners listen for changes to constrained properties. These listeners are used primarily by Beans-aware builder tools. For more information about Beans Properties refer to Properties.

The following table lists Swing components and the listeners that they support. In many cases, the events are fired directly from the component. In other cases, the events are fired from the component's data or selection model. To find out the details for the particular component and listener you're interested in, go first to the component how-to section, and then if necessary to the listener how-to section.

Component	Listener
	action	caret	change	document, undoable edit	item	list selection	window	other
button	X		X		X
check box	X		X		X
color chooser			X
combo box	X				X
dialog							X
editor pane		X		X				hyperlink
file chooser	X
frame							X
internal frame								internal frame
list						X		list data
menu								menu
menu item	X		X		X			menu key menu drag mouse
option pane
password field	X	X		X
popup menu								popup menu
progress bar			X
radio button	X		X		X
slider			X
tabbed pane			X
table						X		table model table column model cell editor
text area		X		X
text field	X	X		X
text pane		X		X				hyperlink
toggle button	X		X		X
tree								tree expansion tree will expand tree model tree selection
viewport (used by scrollpane)			X

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