Thread: JPanel Ontop for JButton

I want to position a JPanel over a bunch of JButtons in such a way that the JButtons would not be able to be clicked on. Is there a way without having to manually disable each of the JButtons using layers or something? Currently any JPanel I put over the top still allows me to click the buttons underneath.

If the JButtons were in an array or a collection that could be easily and quickly iterated, disabling each button is not a big deal. The design you describe - causing the buttons to be hidden or unreachable, covered - is an odd approach that I've never seen implemented.

If a single action listener is used to process all of the buttons, another approach would be to use an on/off flag in the action listener to enable/disable the action for all buttons as needed.

May it be that what you really want is a dialog window popping up? If that is the case look at the JDialog class or the JOptionPane for simple dialogs.

Other then that you could add your JPanel as the glass pane of your frame and catch any incoming mouse events without redispatching them. In this way all your mouse input would be caught by your glass pane and nothing will get through to the buttons.

Ah, good thinking . . . a modal dialog. Check out this page and see if this is what you had in mind or if it helps.