Question

I am starting to write some code in Java Swing and I am getting a little bit mixed up in the hierarchy of listeners that swing offers. Namely I wanted to know when to use, for instance, an ActionListener over ListSelectionListener and how to differentiate when a particular listener gets called from the UI i.e. after what user interaction.

Thanks very much for your responses.

Answer 1

About ActionListener

An action event occurs, whenever an action is performed by the user.
Examples: When the user clicks a button, chooses a menu item, presses
Enter in a text field. The result is that an actionPerformed message
is sent to all action listeners that are registered on the relevant
component. reference

About ListSelectionListener

List selection events occur when the selection in a list or table is
either changing or has just changed. List selection events are fired
from an object that implements the ListSelectionModel interface. To
get a table’s list selection model object, you can use either
getSelectionModel method or getColumnModel().getSelectionModel(). reference

Q. how to differentiate when a particular listener gets called from the UI i.e. after what user interaction.

The above details and the references contains much information to get start with.