Making a JButton clickable inside a JTable

Question

Here is the screenshot of what I want to do :

What\'s happening there

Answer 1

The problem is that the JButton no longer exists when painted in the table. Those components are only used to create a 'stamp' when the table is rendered. There is no actual button present.

There is a way to allow you to click on the button, and still keep your table non-editable, but it is far from proper code. Just a quick outline for a possible solution (I do not have the time at this moment to give a full code example)

• attach a mouse listener to the table
• when you receive a mouse click, determine the cell in which the mouse click occurred
• ask the table renderer for the component for that cell
• use the location of the mouse click to determine whether a button is present in the component from the previous step at that particular location
• if so, do the click through the button api (the doClick method)

And this is not even the dirty part of the code. Since your renderer (hopefully) does not return a new JButton each time, you should in your ActionListener which is attached to the JButton keep track of for which component the click actually occurred. A possible solution is to keep a reference to the table model value for which you the last time created a JButton (so in the getCellRendererComponent method keep track of the row/column), but I am unsure whether this is the best approach.

As said, a possible solution but far from elegant.

The easiest way is to just make that one column editable and use an editor, as pointed out in other answers