Thread: Mouse Listeners

I have a program, which is of bouncing balls running through threads.

My goal is to be able to pause each thread by clicking on the ball as it moves on screen, and resume when clicked again.

I create new threads by using new Thread on same object each time, but i do pass them into an Array List.

How could i go about checking if the user click at coordinates X/Y landed on a SPECIFIC thread, and then be able to reference that thread?

Obviously i can't expect big answers here, but if you have expertise in such an area, could you give me a recommended tutorial which would cover what I'm after.

I'm familiar with the basics of a Mouse Listener, but not at detecting what thread was clicked on, or if mouse was clicked on any thread and so forth.

Thanks in advance.

You will want some to retrieve some sort of Shape that represents your objects to test the clicking.
in Pseudo-code

public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e){
    Shape shape = getShapeSomehow();
    if ( shape.contains(e.getPoint() ){
        //mouse pressed occured in Shape
    }
}

How you retrieve the shape is dependent upon how it is represented graphically. Based upon your other posts I presume your balls are still JPanel's, so you can try calling the getBounds function to retrieve the rectangle associated with that object.

I believe you cannot click on a "thread". You to determine out how to detect click events on the various bouncing ball elements - whatever they may be, use that to change some state variable, and have each thread tracking the state variables. It would be very helpful if you described what you are using to draw the balls with separate threads.

One way to accomplish your goals is to have an array of boolean values...

class BallTracker {
public boolean ballIsPaused[5];
}

create one instance of this:

BallTracker myBallTracker = new BallTracker();

Pass myBallTracker to your code that is running in the threads, so that the threads can check the status, and if ballIsPaused[ballNum] becomes true, then do whatever you need to in the code pause or end the thread.

So the ball bouncing code would look something like this:

if(ballTracker.ballIsPaused[ballNum])
PauseOrKillThread(); //ball is now paused, so do something to wait for unpausing, or kill thread, or something similiar
UpdateAnimation();
Sleep(15); //sleep for 15 ms, I don't know what the real function for this is

Whatever you click detect code does would look something like this:

void OnClick(int ballNum) {
ballTracker.ballIsPaused[ballNum] = true;
}

That is a basic idea of what you need to do - use one common object that each thread as manipulating to change and react to the state.

There are probably many ways to do this, but hopefully this gives you something to start with.