Question

I have enabled tooltips in my JTable by overriding the JComponent method that the JTable inherits:

public String getToolTipText(MouseEvent e) { ... }

Now, suppose a user hovers over a cell, the tooltip appears, and then (s)he starts editing the cell, I want to forcefully dismiss the tooltip.

Currently, the tooltip just hangs around until the value that I specified using ToolTipManager#setDismissDelay expires. The tooltip can sometimes obscure the view of the cell being edited which is why I want to dismiss it the moment any cell on the table goes into edit mode.

I tried the following approach (this is pseudo-code)

public String getToolTipText(MouseEvent e)
{
    if(table-is-editing)
        return null;
    else
        return a-string-to-display-in-the-tooltip;
}

Of course, this only had the effect of NOT showing tooltips of the table is ALREADY in edit mode. I knew this wouldn’t work, but it was more of a shot in the dark.

Answer 1

You can show/hide a tooltip by using code like:

//Action toolTipAction = component.getActionMap().get("postTip");
Action toolTipAction = component.getActionMap().get("hideTip");

if (toolTipAction != null)
{
    ActionEvent ae = new ActionEvent(component, ActionEvent.ACTION_PERFORMED, "");
    toolTipAction.actionPerformed( ae );
}

You couuld probably override the prepareCellEditor(...) method of JTable to add this code and it should hide any tooltip before displaying the editor.

Edit:

In response to Kleopatra’s comment I then add the following to make sure the Action is added to the ActionMap:

table.getInputMap().put(KeyStroke.getKeyStroke("pressed F2"), "dummy");
ToolTipManager.sharedInstance().registerComponent( table );