Question

I have a small Java desktop app that uses Swing. There is a data entry dialog with some input fields of different types (JTextField, JComboBox, JSpinner, JFormattedTextField). When I activate the JFormattedTextFields either by tabbing through the form or by clicking it with the mouse, I would like it to select all the text that it currently contains. That way, users could just start typing and overwrite the default values.

How can I do that? I did use a FocusListener/FocusAdapter that calls selectAll() on the JFormattedTextField, but it doesn’t select anything, although the FocusAdapter’s focusGained() method is called (see code sample below).

private javax.swing.JFormattedTextField pricePerLiter;
// ...
pricePerLiter.setFormatterFactory(
    new JFormattedTextField.AbstractFormatterFactory() {
    private NumberFormatter formatter = null;
    public JFormattedTextField.AbstractFormatter 
        getFormatter(JFormattedTextField jft) {
        if (formatter == null) {
            formatter = new NumberFormatter(new DecimalFormat("#0.000"));
            formatter.setValueClass(Double.class);
        }
        return formatter;
    }
});
// ...
pricePerLiter.addFocusListener(new java.awt.event.FocusAdapter() {
    public void focusGained(java.awt.event.FocusEvent evt) {
        pricePerLiter.selectAll();
    }
});

Any ideas? The funny thing is that selecting all of its text apparently is the default behavior for both JTextField and JSpinner, at least when tabbing through the form.

Answer 1

Wrap your call with SwingUtilities.invokeLater so it will happen after all pending AWT events have been processed :

pricePerLiter.addFocusListener(new java.awt.event.FocusAdapter() {
    public void focusGained(java.awt.event.FocusEvent evt) {
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                pricePerLiter.selectAll();
            }
        });
    }
});