Setting the focus to a text field

Question

I have an application developed in netbeans and I want to set the focus to a certain jTextField when a panel is displayed  I have read a number of post and have tried various methods but non have worked  One of the main issues is where to place the required code  which I believe in my case is this txtMessage requestFocusInWindow      There are some posts that indicate using a Window Listener  however as netbeans has generated the GUI  I cannot see how to implement the interfaces as I cannot edit the code that creates the jPANEL etc  The whole thing is very frustrating and I really do not believe that this should be that difficult    Just as a test I added the requestFocusInWindow    to a button on the panel and it did set the focus to the desired input

User · Answer

This is an easy one   textField setFocus

User · Answer

I have had a similar scenario where I needed to set the focus on a text box within a panel when the panel was shown  The panel was loaded on application startup  so I couldn t set the focus in the constructor  As the panel wasn t being loaded or being given focus on show  this meant that I had no event to fire the focus request from   To solve this  I added a global method to my main that called a method in the panel that invoked requestFocusInWindow   on the text area  I put the call to the global method in the button that showed the panel  after the call to show  This meant that the panel would be shown and then the text area assigned the focus after showing the panel  Hope that makes sense and helps   Also  you can edit most of the auto-generated code by right clicking on the object in design view and selecting customize code  however I don t think that it allows you to edit panels

User · Answer

I m not sure if I m missing something here  but there s no reason why you can t add a listener to your panel    In Netbeans  just hit the  Source  button in the top left of the editor window and you can edit most of the code  The actual layout code is mostly locked  but you can even customize that if you need to   As far as I m aware  txtMessage requestFocusInWindow   is supposed to set up the default focus for when the window is displayed the first time  If you want to request the focus after the window has been displayed already  you should use txtMessage requestFocus    For testing  you can just add a listener in the constructor   addWindowListener new WindowAdapter       public void windowOpened  WindowEvent e        txtMessage requestFocus

User · Answer

In a JFrame or JDialog you can always overwrite the setVisible   method  it works well  I haven t tried in a JPanel  but can be an alternative    Override public void setVisible boolean value        super setVisible value       control requestFocusInWindow

User · Answer

None of the above worked for me  because my window is a JPopupMenu   What did work was this   addAncestorListener new AncestorListener          Override     public void ancestorAdded AncestorEvent ae            myEdit requestFocus                      other ancestor listener methods

User · Answer

If you create your GUI with Netbeans  you can also insert some self written code  Just select an element  maybe the button  panel or the window  and use the  Code -tab in the  Properties -dialog    There you can insert Pre- and Post- code for various parts of the creation process   I think the  After-All-Set-Code  field of the window is a good place for your code  or you could bind it to the event   Properties -dialog -   Events    componentShown  of the text field   panel

User · Answer

For me the easiest way to get it to work  is to put the component requestFocus    line  after the setVisible true   line  at the bottom of your frame or panel constructor   This probably has something to do with asking for the focus  after all components have been created  because creating a new component  after asking for the focus request  will make your component loose te focus  and make the focus go to your newly created component  At least  that s what I assume

User · Answer

I have toyed with this for forever  and finally found something that seems to always work   textField   new JTextField          public void addNotify             super addNotify            requestFocus

User · Answer

I did it by setting an AncesterAdded event on the textField and the requesting focus in the window

[java] Setting the focus to a text field

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