Question

I have a JTable inside a JPanel. I can scroll up and down the JPanel using the mouse’s scroll wheel, but when my mouse is hovering over the JTable, I have to move it out of the table to scroll back up the JPanel using the scroll wheel. Is there a way I can scroll up and down the JPanel using the scroll wheel if the mouse is hovering over the JTable?

Answer 1

I took Xeon’s advice in the comment above and implemented a mouse wheel listener that forwards mouse wheel events to the parent component. See the code below.

public class CustomMouseWheelListener implements MouseWheelListener {

  private JScrollBar bar;
  private int previousValue = 0;
  private JScrollPane parentScrollPane;
  private JScrollPane customScrollPane;

  /** @return The parent scroll pane, or null if there is no parent. */
  private JScrollPane getParentScrollPane() {
    if (this.parentScrollPane == null) {
      Component parent = this.customScrollPane.getParent();
      while (!(parent instanceof JScrollPane) && parent != null) {
        parent = parent.getParent();
      }
      this.parentScrollPane = (JScrollPane) parent;
    }
    return this.parentScrollPane;
  }

  /**
   * Creates a new CustomMouseWheelListener.
   * @param customScrollPane The scroll pane to which this listener belongs.
   */
  public CustomMouseWheelListener(JScrollPane customScrollPane) {
    ValidationUtils.checkNull(customScrollPane);
    this.customScrollPane = customScrollPane;
    this.bar = this.customScrollPane.getVerticalScrollBar();
  }

  /** {@inheritDoc} */
  @Override
  public void mouseWheelMoved(MouseWheelEvent event) {
    JScrollPane parent = getParentScrollPane();
    if (parent != null) {
      if (event.getWheelRotation() < 0) {
        if (this.bar.getValue() == 0 && this.previousValue == 0) {
          parent.dispatchEvent(cloneEvent(event));
        }
      }
      else {
        if (this.bar.getValue() == getMax() && this.previousValue == getMax()) {
          parent.dispatchEvent(cloneEvent(event));
        }
      }
      this.previousValue = this.bar.getValue();
    }
    else {
      this.customScrollPane.removeMouseWheelListener(this);
    }
  }

  /** @return The maximum value of the scrollbar. */
  private int getMax() {
    return this.bar.getMaximum() - this.bar.getVisibleAmount();
  }

  /**
   * Copies the given MouseWheelEvent.
   * 
   * @param event The MouseWheelEvent to copy.
   * @return A copy of the mouse wheel event.
   */
  private MouseWheelEvent cloneEvent(MouseWheelEvent event) {
    return new MouseWheelEvent(getParentScrollPane(), event.getID(), event.getWhen(),
        event.getModifiers(), 1, 1, event.getClickCount(), false, event.getScrollType(),
        event.getScrollAmount(), event.getWheelRotation());
  }

}