Question

GUI development with Swing.

I have a custom dialog for choosing a file to be opened in my application; its class extends javax.swing.JDialog and contains, among other components, a JFileChooser, which can be toggled to be shown or hidden.

The JFileChooser component already handles the ESC key by itself: when the file chooser is shown (embedded in my dialog) and I press ESC, the file chooser hides itself.

Now I would like my dialog to do the same: when I press ESC, I want the dialog to close. Mind you, when the embedded file chooser is shown, the ESC key should only hide it.

Any ideas ?

Answer 1

Use InputMap and ActionMap for dealing with key actions in Swing. To close the dialog cleanly, send a window closing event to it.

From my now defunct weblog:

private static final KeyStroke escapeStroke =      KeyStroke.getKeyStroke(KeyEvent.VK_ESCAPE, 0);  public static final String dispatchWindowClosingActionMapKey =      "com.spodding.tackline.dispatch:WINDOW_CLOSING";  public static void installEscapeCloseOperation(final JDialog dialog) {      Action dispatchClosing = new AbstractAction() {          public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent event) {              dialog.dispatchEvent(new WindowEvent(                  dialog, WindowEvent.WINDOW_CLOSING              ));          }      };      JRootPane root = dialog.getRootPane();      root.getInputMap(JComponent.WHEN_IN_FOCUSED_WINDOW).put(          escapeStroke, dispatchWindowClosingActionMapKey      );      root.getActionMap().put( dispatchWindowClosingActionMapKey, dispatchClosing      );  }