Question

I have built a custom component that shows only a line. The line is drawn from the top left corner to the bottom right corner as a Line2D at the paint method. The background is transparent. I extended JComponent. These line components are draggable and change their line color when the mouse pointer is located max. 15 pixels away from the drawn line.
But if I have multiple of these components added to another custom component that extends JPanel they sometimes overlap. I want to implement that if the mouse pointer is more than 15 pixels away from the line the mouse events should fall through the component. How to let it fall through is my problem.
Is that even possible?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

For my final year project at university I did a whiteboard program and had the same problem. For each shape the user drew on the board I created a JComponent, which was fine when they were drawing rectangles, but more difficult with the free form line tool.

The way I fixed it in the end was to do away with JComponents altogether. I had a JPanel which held a Vector (I think) of custom Shape objects. Each object held its own coordinates and line thicknesses and such. When the user clicked on the board, the mouse listener on the JPanel fired and went through each Shape calling a contains(int x, int y) method on each one (x and y being the coordinates of the event). Because the Shapes were added to the Vector as they were drawn I knew that the last one to return true was the topmost Shape.

This is what I used for a straight line contains method. The maths might be a bit iffy but it worked for me.

public boolean contains(int x, int y) {

    // Check if line is a point
    if(posX == endX && posY == endY){
        if(Math.abs(posY - y) <= lineThickness / 2 && Math.abs(posX - x) <= lineThickness / 2)
            return true;
        else
            return false;
    }

    int x1, x2, y1, y2;

    if(posX < endX){
        x1 = posX;
        y1 = posY;
        x2 = endX;
        y2 = endY;
    }
    else{
        x1 = endX;
        y1 = endY;
        x2 = posX;
        y2 = posY;
    }


    /**** USING MATRIX TRANSFORMATIONS ****/

    double r_numerator = (x-x1)*(x2-x1) + (y-y1)*(y2-y1);
    double r_denomenator = (x2-x1)*(x2-x1) + (y2-y1)*(y2-y1);
    double r = r_numerator / r_denomenator;

    // s is the position of the perpendicular projection of the point along
    // the line: s < 0 = point is left of the line; s > 0 = point is right of
    // the line; s = 0 = the point is along the line
    double s =  ((y1-y)*(x2-x1)-(x1-x)*(y2-y1) ) / r_denomenator;

    double distance = Math.abs(s)*Math.sqrt(r_denomenator);

    // Point is along the length of the line
    if ( (r >= 0) && (r <= 1) )
    {
            if(Math.abs(distance) <= lineThickness / 2){
                return true;
            }
            else
                return false;
    }
    // else point is at one end of the line
    else{
        double dist1 = (x-x1)*(x-x1) + (y-y1)*(y-y1); // distance to start of line
        double dist2 = (x-x2)*(x-x2) + (y-y2)*(y-y2); // distance to end of line
        if (dist1 < dist2){
            distance = Math.sqrt(dist1);
        }
        else{
            distance = Math.sqrt(dist2);
        }
        if(distance <= lineThickness / 2){
            return true;
        }
        else
            return false;
    }
    /**** END USING MATRIX TRANSFORMATIONS****/

}

posX and posY make up the coordinates of the start of the line and endX and endY are, yep, the end of the line. This returned true if the click is within lineThickness/2 of the centre of the line, otherwise you have to click right along the very middle of the line.

Drawing the Shapes was a case of passing in the JPanel’s Graphics object to each Shape and doing the drawing with that.