Detecting mouse enter/exit events anywhere on JPanel

Question

Basically there is a JPanel on which I want to know when the mouse enters the area of the JPanel and exits the area of the JPanel. So I added a mouse listener, but if there

Answer 1

This is sample code implementing Ash's solution. For me, the JFrame did not detect all exit events properly, but an inner JPanel did, so I passed in two components - one for testing descendants and one for testing the boundary.

Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().addAWTEventListener(
        new TargetedMouseHandler(this, this.jPanel), 
        AWTEvent.MOUSE_EVENT_MASK);
}

public class TargetedMouseHandler implements AWTEventListener
{

    private Component parent;
    private Component innerBound;
    private boolean hasExited = true;

    public TargetedMouseHandler(Component p, Component p2)
    {
        parent = p;
        innerBound = p2;
    }

    @Override
    public void eventDispatched(AWTEvent e)
    {
        if (e instanceof MouseEvent)
        {
            if (SwingUtilities.isDescendingFrom(
                (Component) e.getSource(), parent))
            {
                MouseEvent m = (MouseEvent) e;
                if (m.getID() == MouseEvent.MOUSE_ENTERED)
                {
                    if (hasExited)
                    {
                        System.out.println("Entered");
                        hasExited = false;
                    }
                } else if (m.getID() == MouseEvent.MOUSE_EXITED)
                {
                    Point p = SwingUtilities.convertPoint(
                        (Component) e.getSource(),
                        m.getPoint(),
                        innerBound);
                    if (!innerBound.getBounds().contains(p))
                    {
                        System.out.println("Exited");
                        hasExited = true;
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}