How to select all text in a JFormattedTextField when it gets focus?

Question

I have a small Java desktop app that uses Swing. There is a data entry dialog with some input fields of different types (JTextField, JComboBox, JSpinner, JFormattedTextField). When I activate the JFormattedTextFields either by tabbing through the form or by clicking it with the mouse, I would like it to select all the text that it currently contains. That way, users could just start typing and overwrite the default values.

How can I do that? I did use a FocusListener/FocusAdapter that calls selectAll() on the JFormattedTextField, but it doesn't select anything, although the FocusAdapter's focusGained() method is called (see code sample below).

private javax.swing.JFormattedTextField pricePerLiter; // ... pricePerLiter.setFormatterFactory(     new JFormattedTextField.AbstractFormatterFactory() {     private NumberFormatter formatter = null;     public JFormattedTextField.AbstractFormatter          getFormatter(JFormattedTextField jft) {         if (formatter == null) {             formatter = new NumberFormatter(new DecimalFormat("#0.000"));             formatter.setValueClass(Double.class);         }         return formatter;     } }); // ... pricePerLiter.addFocusListener(new java.awt.event.FocusAdapter() {     public void focusGained(java.awt.event.FocusEvent evt) {         pricePerLiter.selectAll();     } }); 

Any ideas? The funny thing is that selecting all of its text apparently is the default behavior for both JTextField and JSpinner, at least when tabbing through the form.

Answer 1

Wrap your call with SwingUtilities.invokeLater so it will happen after all pending AWT events have been processed :

pricePerLiter.addFocusListener(new java.awt.event.FocusAdapter() {     public void focusGained(java.awt.event.FocusEvent evt) {         SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {             @Override             public void run() {                 pricePerLiter.selectAll();             }         });     } }); 

Answer 2

In addition to the above, if you want this for all text fields you can just do:

KeyboardFocusManager.getCurrentKeyboardFocusManager()     .addPropertyChangeListener("permanentFocusOwner", new PropertyChangeListener() {     public void propertyChange(final PropertyChangeEvent e)     {         if (e.getNewValue() instanceof JTextField)         {             SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable()             {                 public void run()                 {                     JTextField textField = (JTextField)e.getNewValue();                     textField.selectAll();                 }             });          }     } });