Question

I have an application with a popup menu. I’d like to use the popup in the usual way (i.e., it should appear when the user right-clicks anywhere in the window), but I’d also like to attach it to the main MenuBar at the top of the window. I’m not sure how to do this.

I’d thought it would as simple as calling
myJMenuBar.add(myPopupMenu)
but this doesn’t work.

JMenuBar.add() wants a JMenu parameter, not a JPopupMenu.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Answer 1

Instead of trying to reuse the JPopupMenu object, the best approach would be to encapsulate the actions that the menus perform, and reuse those. The popup would trigger those actions, as would the menu items.

From the Action JavaDoc:

In addition to the actionPerformed method defined by the ActionListener interface, this interface allows the application to define, in a single place:

• One or more text strings that describe the function. These strings can be used, for example, to display the flyover text for a button or to set the text in a menu item.
• One or more icons that depict the function. These icons can be used for the images in a menu control, or for composite entries in a more sophisticated user interface.
• The enabled/disabled state of the functionality. Instead of having to separately disable the menu item and the toolbar button, the application can disable the function that implements this interface. All components which are registered as listeners for the state change then know to disable event generation for that item and to modify the display accordingly.

and

JPopupMenu, JToolBar and JMenu all provide convenience methods for creating a component and setting the Action on the corresponding component. Refer to each of these classes for more information.