Question

I need to override the enter key functionality on a JTable. At present the default behaviour is to move the row selection down one row when the user presses the ‘Enter’ key. I want to disable this and get it to do something different based on their selection. The problem is that it seems to move down before it goes into my keylistener which takes in the row selection – this therefore opens another window with the wrong row selected.

This is my code so far…:

public class MyJTable extends JTable {


   public MyJTable(){
        setRowSelectionAllowed(true);
        addListeners()
    }

    public void addListeners(){

         addKeyListener(new KeyListener() {
                @Override
                public void keyTyped(KeyEvent e) {}

                @Override
                public void keyPressed(KeyEvent e) {}

                @Override
                public void keyReleased(KeyEvent e) {
                    int key = e.getKeyCode();
                    if (key == KeyEvent.VK_ENTER) {

                        openChannel();
                    }
                }
           });
    }

    public void openChannel(){
            for (int selectedRow : getSelectedRows()){
                //Code to open channel based on row selected
            }
        }
}

Answer 1

+1 to @Robin’s answer

Adding to my comment…

Swing uses KeyBindings simply replace exisitng functionality by adding a new KeyBinding to JTable (the beauty happens because of JComponent.WHEN_ANCESTOR_OF_FOCUSED_COMPONENT):

private void createKeybindings(JTable table) {
table.getInputMap(JComponent.WHEN_ANCESTOR_OF_FOCUSED_COMPONENT).put(KeyStroke.getKeyStroke(KeyEvent.VK_ENTER, 0), "Enter");
    table.getActionMap().put("Enter", new AbstractAction() {
        @Override
        public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ae) {
            //do something on JTable enter pressed
        }
    });
}

simply call this method and pass JTable instance to override standard functionality of JTable ENTER