Which mouse button is the middle one?

Question

I'm currently developing a program in Java where a certain event must be triggered only when the user clicks with both the left and the right click on a button.

Since it is a little unconventional, I decided to first test this. Here it is:

import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JLabel;
import java.awt.event.MouseListener;
import java.awt.event.MouseEvent;

public class GUI
{
    private JFrame mainframe;
    private JButton thebutton;

    private boolean left_is_pressed;
    private boolean right_is_pressed;

    private JLabel notifier;

    public GUI ()
    {
        thebutton = new JButton ("Double Press Me");
        addListen ();
        thebutton.setBounds (20, 20, 150, 40);

        notifier = new JLabel (" ");
        notifier.setBounds (20, 100, 170, 20);

        mainframe = new JFrame ("Double Mouse Tester");
        mainframe.setDefaultCloseOperation (JFrame.DISPOSE_ON_CLOSE);
        mainframe.setResizable (false);
        mainframe.setSize (400, 250);

        mainframe.setLayout (null);

        mainframe.add (thebutton);
        mainframe.add (notifier);

        mainframe.setVisible (true);

        left_is_pressed = right_is_pressed = false;
    }

    private void addListen ()
    {
        thebutton.addMouseListener (new MouseListener ()
        {
            @Override public void mouseClicked (MouseEvent e) { }
            @Override public void mouseEntered (MouseEvent e) { }
            @Override public void mouseExited (MouseEvent e) { }

            @Override public void mousePressed (MouseEvent e)
            {
                //If left button pressed
                if (e.getButton () == MouseEvent.BUTTON1)
                {
                    //Set that it is pressed
                    left_is_pressed = true;

                    if (right_is_pressed)
                    {
                        //Write that both are pressed
                        notifier.setText ("Both pressed");
                    }

                }
                //If right button pressed
                else if (e.getButton () == MouseEvent.BUTTON3)
                {
                    //Set that it is pressed
                    right_is_pressed = true;

                    if (left_is_pressed)
                    {
                        //Write that both are pressed
                        notifier.setText ("Both pressed");
                    }
                }
            }

            @Override public void mouseReleased (MouseEvent e)
            {
                //If left button is released
                if (e.getButton () == MouseEvent.BUTTON1)
                {
                    //Set that it is not pressed
                    left_is_pressed = false;

                    //Remove notification
                    notifier.setText (" ");
                }
                //If right button is released
                else if (e.getButton () == MouseEvent.BUTTON3)
                {
                    //Set that it is not pressed
                    right_is_pressed = false;

                    //Remove notification
                    notifier.setText (" ");
                }
            }
        });
    }
}

I tested it and it works, but there is a problem.

As you can see, the left mouse button is represented by MouseEvent.BUTTON1 and the right mouse button by MouseEvent.BUTTON3 .

If the user has a mouse which doesn't have a scroll wheel (apparently such mice still exist), then only two buttons are set in MouseEvent. Does that mean that the right button will be represented by MouseEvent.BUTTON2 instead of MouseEvent.BUTTON3 ? If yes, how can I change my code to accomodate this? Is there any way I can detect something like this?

I read anything I could find on the MouseListener interface and on MouseEvent, but I couldn't find something about this.

Answer 1

To determine which of the Mouse buttons is pressed, these three methods from SwingUtilities could help you:

1. isLeftMouseButton
2. isMiddleMouseButton
3. isRightMouseButton

Answer 2

You can use the utilities methods from SwingUtilties :

SwingUtilities.isLeftMouseButton(MouseEvent anEvent)   
SwingUtilities.isRightMouseButton(MouseEvent anEvent) 
SwingUtilities.isMiddleMouseButton(MouseEvent anEvent)

Answer 3

There is also MouseEvent.isPopupTrigger() . This method should return true, if the right mouse button is pressed.