In this short tutorial we are going to see how to monitor a very basic GUI event in Java Desktop Applications, which is mouse clicks. What we want to see is what button mouse the user pressed (left, middle or right click) and then we want to know the exact location, in coordinates, in our Frame that this event occurred.
In short, to handle mouse clicks in a Java AWT application :
- Create a
JFrame - Create a
MouseAdapterand add it to theJFrameusingaddMouseListenermethod. - Use
MouseEvent.getModifiers()andInputEventorMouseEventmasks to see what button of the mouse the user clicked. Alternatively you can useMouseEvent.getButton()method - Use
MouseEvent.getX()andMouseEvent.getY()to get the coordinates of the point that the user clicked into. - Use
MouseEvent.getClickCountto get the amount of clicks that the user performed.
So, let’s see the code snippet bellow:
package com.javacodegeeks.snippets.desktop;
import java.awt.event.MouseAdapter;
import java.awt.event.MouseEvent;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JTextArea;
public class Main extends JFrame {
public Main() {
setSize(600, 600);
setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
final JTextArea text = new JTextArea();
text.setText("Click inside the white area. Use all the buttons in your mouse!");
text.addMouseListener(new MouseAdapter() {
@Override
public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent event) {
if (event.getButton() == MouseEvent.NOBUTTON) {
text.setText("No button clicked");
} else if (event.getButton() == MouseEvent.BUTTON1) {
text.setText("Button 1 clicked");
} else if (event.getButton() == MouseEvent.BUTTON2) {
text.setText("Button 2 clicked");
} else if (event.getButton() == MouseEvent.BUTTON3) {
text.setText("Button 3 clicked");
}
System.out.println("Number of clicks: " + event.getClickCount());
System.out.println("Pointing at (X, Y): " + event.getX() + ", " + event.getY());
}
});
getContentPane().add(text);
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
new Main().setVisible(true);
}
}
This was an example on how to handle mouse clicks in Java.
