What is the best way to make clickable text in java?

Question

This is for an application so I don't want a hyperlink. I first tried using a Jbutton without all of border/background stuff and then hooking up an actionListener to it but I couldn't get it to the point where I thought it looked nice. I also tried using a JLabel and hooking up a mouse listener to that but I also couldn't get it to look right.

Basically I would like a way using swing to make a button exactly like a url link in an application. What is the standard way of doing this?

Answer 1

but I couldn't get it to the point where I thought it looked nice

You might want to go into greater detail on just what "looked nice" means. I can see you solving this by either a JButton or a JLabel, but the key is perhaps not to look for another solution but to play with the settings of the button or the label til they look nice. If you can't find a nice solution, then post your code (an SSCCE would work best of all) and perhaps we can help you.

Answer 2

that isn't answer to your question but are you tried to add ButtonModel to your JButton example here

Answer 3

It is a rather heavy hammer to use, but SwingX has a JXHyperLink control that is probably exactly what you want. The source is at http://java.net/projects/swingx/sources/svn/content/trunk/swingx-core/src/main/java/org/jdesktop/swingx/JXHyperlink.java?rev=4027 and you can see an article about it at http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t18617.html .

It is old, but SwingX continues to do good things.

Answer 4

It's you're trying to make a desktop application which looks like HTML inside a browser, you might try using some of the richer Swing text components in a read-only mode. You could use a mouse-listener to map X/Y clicks to a particular character of text, and then cause an action to occur on that basis.