Question

I have a JTable, where a user can select a single row. If that happens, i want to “highlight” another part of the page for a short time to indicate that this is the part of the page that changed after the user interaction.

So my question is: What’s the best way to achieve this? At the moment i did it by setting the background color of that panel and starting a SwingWorker which sets the Color back after a short delay. It works as intended, but is it a good idea to use a SwingWorker like that? Are there any drawbacks to that approach? How would you solve this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I guess a Swing Timer would be a better option as it reuses a single thread for all scheduled events and executes the event code on the main event loop. So, inside your SelectionListener code you do:

// import javax.swing.Timer;

final Color backup = componentX.getBackground();
componentX.setBackground(Color.YELLOW);
final Timer t = new Timer(700, new ActionListener() {
  public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
    componentX.setBackground(backup);
  }
});
t.setRepeats(false);
t.start();