An example illustrating drag and drop using JDK 1.4

Updated 15th Feb' 2002

Standard disclaimer
There is no copyright attached with the code available here. I have put this up to provide some information on issues I had a hard time resolving. The code has been put together as an example and in a hurry. You can use this code anyway you want at your own risk. Don't blame if weird things start happening to your machine. If you find any of this useful, drop me a mail :-). Please send suggestions / comments / flame to me

Standard disclaimer

There is no copyright attached with the code available here. I have put this up to provide some information on issues I had a hard time resolving. The code has been put together as an example and in a hurry. You can use this code anyway you want at your own risk. Don't blame if weird things start happening to your machine. If you find any of this useful, drop me a mail :-). Please send suggestions / comments / flame to me

This example shows how to

Drag and drop using the new TransferHandler class available with JDK 1.4. (TransferHandler takes care of installing key stroke handlers to capture ctrl-c/v/x to copy/paste/cut from your JComponent.)
Drag and drop multiple elements from one JComponent to another.
Writing a custom TransferHandler.
Creating custom data flavors.
Create a custom Transferable object to encapsulate underlying objects.

Issues still not addressed

The annoying issue of having to click on an existing selection to be able to drag.
Drag causes the visible selection to change.
While dropping elements on the JTable you have to place the cursor on some existing row.
Cut behaves like copy for now.
Comments in code :-).

What kind of data transfer does this program handle?

Going through each component -

MyTree accepts data only from MyTable

MyTable

MyTable accepts data only from MyTree

MyTree

MyText accepts data from MyTree, MyTable, or any other source which can provide data as text or in the stringFlavor. MyText also accepts file(s) dragged from Windows File explorer, these files appear as lines of file names in the text area.

Source files:

Setup:

The only pre-requisite is that you should have JDK 1.4 installed.
Download all the files listed above.
Compile all of them ( javac *.java will do just fine).
To run, type java Foo.