JTextField and KeyEvents ...

[Tom Diamond]

Hello,
I have a JTextField and I want to capture key events from it. OK, I've written a nice KeyAdapter class and added it to the text field. But it seems that the event is proccessed firstly in my class and then in the JTextField's keyEvent listener. What I am saying is that I want to use the getText() method in my custom keyTyped() but it returns the text in the field without the last char.
So is there a way to send the keyEvent to the text field before I proccess it so that the text that getText() returns will be updated?
Tnx,
Tom.

[Joe Gilvary]

That sounds weird.
If you do not find some more elegant way to
handle it, how about appending the
KeyEvent.getKeyChar() to the String that you
can see?
HTH,
Joe

[Tom Diamond]

Well, that is what I thought at first but the problem is that I have to take care of non-printable chars (i.e. Backspace - Delete) and also see if the user has selected some text. I wonder if there is a better way to do it ...
Tom.

[Manfred Leonhardt]

Hi Tom,
The cleanest approach would be to extend the JTextField and override the processKeyEvent method. This would make sure that the keyEvent was handled by the TextField before you do your thing. See the code below for an example.

import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class KeyTextField extends JTextField
{
  public KeyTextField()
  {
    this( "", 10 );
  }
  public KeyTextField( int col )
  {
    this( "", col );
  }
  public KeyTextField( String s, int col )
  {
    super( s, col );
  }
[B]
  protected void processKeyEvent( KeyEvent ke )
  {
    // Call super to perform the work
    super.processKeyEvent( ke );
    // Do something extra for key typed.
    if( ke.getID() == KeyEvent.KEY_TYPED )
    {
      System.out.println( getText() );
    }
  }
[/B]
  public static void main(String[] args) 
  {
    JFrame f = new JFrame( "Test" );
    f.getContentPane().add( new KeyTextField( "Test", 20 ) );
    f.setSize( 100, 100 );
    f.show();
  }
}

Regards,
Manfred.