Home/ Questions/Q 7544767
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-30T08:45:33+00:00

We have an application which, as its first UI action, displays a modal JDialog

  • 0

We have an application which, as its first UI action, displays a modal JDialog without a parent frame.

public LoginDialog(Frame owner, Config config, Object... params) {
    super((Frame)null, true);

It unfortunately has the annoying characteristic that when it appears, although it comes to the front, it does not grab the focus.

So the user, after launching the application by double-clicking on the start menu, has to use the mouse to select the “login” dialog and type in information.

Is there a way to make this JDialog grab the focus when it appears in the front?

I’ve tried calls to “requestFocus” before, after and via invokeLater “during” the call to setVisible(true) – but none of these seems to have any effect.

How do we make a modal dialog grab the focus?

UPDATE: The issue was the code used to try to present a background “wait window”. This window was displayed “behind” the login dialog as a hack so that when the dialog disappeared the user would see the “Please wait” message. As it was the first window created by the application, it got the focus. I am not sure if there would have been a way to make the dialog gain the focus again inside the event dispatch thread with this hack – but I fixed it by un-hacking it and doing things properly.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    First, it a little strange that modal dialog is parent-less. The point in modal dialog is that it is displayed on its parent and does not allow to access parent.

    So, the first recommendation is to make it non-modal. I believe it will work.

    BTW I have just tried to create such dialog and have not problems with focus. Try probably to simplify your code:

        JDialog d = new JDialog();
    d.setSize(200, 200);
    d.setVisible(true);

    This works for me and I believe will work for you. Now start changing this simple code towords your real application code. At some point it will stop working and you will see where the problem is.

    If nothing helps try to use the trick I described in this article. Look for title “Portable window activation”. I hope it will help.

    • 0