I am writing a Java Swing application that needs to have a window receive mouse movement events when the application is not activated - think of it like a global always-on-top toolbar that animates when the mouse passes over it.
From my research so far, I have seen that the Mac Java JRE only passes events when the application has focus.
It does not appear to be a limitation of the OS, so I was hoping that there was a system property, an application package property or a system call that enabled non-activated event handling. Failing that, some method of globally capturing mouse movement events and passing them in to the Java application.
Thanks for any suggestions...
Edit: One further question: Once mouse move events have been captured, how do you feed them into Swing so that they are treated in the same was as native OS mouse events -- by finding the component under the mouse and sending a MouseEvent to it...
This isn't possible with pure Java.
You will need JNI and to write a global keylistener (or a keyboard hook) in C++ or another language.
Here are some topics about Global KeyListener:
Coderanch.
My own topic on Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow
Keyboard hooks in Mac OS X
On the last topic: this was a given solution for OSX.
Related
I need to get the absolute location of mouse after a click on the screen. I've already searched on the web but the only solution I have found uses this method:
MouseInfo.getPointerInfo().getLocation()
which gets the position independently from the click.
Otherwise, i have to use an EventListener to check out when the mouse is clicked, but the problem is that listeners are related to a component, while i need the absolute location.
How can i solve this?
This is an OS dependent feature. As far as I understand your question, you don't have a GUI or you don't want to add a listener to your GUI components. JVM will only receive clicks for components that are related to it.
Here you have to write some native code to hook to events that you want on your own, or you should use a library like jnativehook that does the same thing for you and you don't need to write code for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
I know that Robot class in java is used to generateInputevents such as mouseMove,press and release and also keyevents ,i know only the functionality i.e if i call mouseMove(x,y) mousepointer will move to the (x,y) position.I don't know ,Actually what happens inside i.e what are the steps take by JVM to interact with os to move the mouse pointer and other events?
The nice thing about the Java library is that a lot of it is opensource. A quick glance through it shows that on Unix-ish platforms it creates a XToolkit and then there's a lot of interfacing with the X11 library to send keyboard and mouse events.
In particular, all of the events are eventually dispatched to sun.awt.X11.XRobotPeer, who then dispatches them to awt_Robot.c who then calls various X11 functions to produce particular events.
So from this question In Java Swing how do you get a Win32 window handle (hwnd) reference to a window? it appears that I can get the window32 handle .
would it be possible for java.awt.Robot to send mouse/keyboard events to that window handle?
sometimes when I am sending keys via Robot, if the window gets minimized, it will start typing into other background irrelevant windows that are open. I want to prevent this by allowing Robot to send keys and mouse events to that specific window of interest.
Would it be possible to achieve the same deal in Mac and Linux as well? be able to send Robot events to those respective specific window handles?
This is a classic problem with Robot. As they have quoted in the other thread, its not possible with pure AWT/Swing. You have to get into sun's internal API or use native code. There is not getting around that problem.
It is exactly because of the problem that you have i.e. make it work across OS's is why Java has not exposed such a control.
It would be useful to know what you are using this for.
I have never worked on android before and hence I am presuming that implementing touch/mouse events for a tablet/mobile application might slightly be different compared to events triggered in GUI components of native programming languages.
This question is not related to Android though. If I completely remove all traces of Android OS from a tablet, load and mount it with just a Linux kernel with jvm/jre installed, and few jars that launch a custom java GUI application i.e in such a way that the tablet boots and starts with the custom java application by default, Will this native swing based desktop application respond to mouse events triggered by touch? If yes, is it as good as that in Android?
PS: Precisely, With more emphasis on mouse click, mouse entered and mouse exited events..
I am a newbie to Java and I'd like to know how to handle Windows' events in Java. To be specific, I'd like to know how to handle events such as mouse moved or mouse clicked in Windows XP and Windows Vista. I want to wire my own custom behavior in my application to these events, even when my application is inactive or otherwise hidden.
Check this out: Implementing Listeners for Commonly Handled Events.