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How to make a jButton respond to Enter key

 
Greenhorn
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Hi,
I want to how I can make a jButton react to key baord. I've experimented with setting its mneomonic value but every time I have to press Alt + Enter for the key to respond. I want it to respond to Enter only. Here is what I'm doing. I have two jTextArea's and a "copy" button that takes some text from the fist jTextArea and copies it to the second one. This is just and experimental program. Now at first, jButton1.setEnabled(false). As soon as a key is typed the first jTextArea's event listener detects this and sets jButton.setEnabled(true). Now the button is enabled and I want to how I can have it work by pressing the Enter key on my keybaord instead of having to click on it everytime using the mouse.

Thanks so much for you help
 
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The way to bind a KeyStroke to a JComponent is with the components InputMap and ActionMap as shown in the java tutorial.

The difficulty with this is that as long as the focus is on/in a JTextField the JTextField will consume the keystroke. The "enter" keystoke, ie, typing "enter", generates an ActionEvent in a JTextField. So one way to work with this might be to set an Action (as shown below) or add an ActionListener to the JTextField to do the copy behavior.

You can still register the "enter" keystroke on the copy button but to use it you must navigate through/past the JTextFields to the button with the tab key and then press the enter key. Seems like more work than the mnemonic option.

[ July 30, 2004: Message edited by: Craig Wood ]
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