How to over ride Dialog boxes over JFrames?

I Have a java program that does sort of this:

It starts off with dialog boxes, then after user clicks OK/Cancel or X or whatever, it goes to JFrames or dialog boxes. The JFrames also have buttons like Next/Ok, etc. As the program goes on, one JFrame (lets call it "Status Bar") is always visi开发者_如何学Goble on the screen and never goes away (that's what I want). (I don't want to dispose it because they hold important information that the user needs to see while making choices on future dialog boxes and other JFrames).

Now my problem occurs..when the future dialog box appears, I can't click on that JFrame "Status Bar". For some reason, I have to do something on the dialog box first. Like I have to click Ok/Cancel on the dialog box, if I get another dialog box (depends where on the program), I have same issue. Until I am blessed with another JFrame, then I can click on the "Status bar" JFrame, click buttons on it and all the good things presented on that JFrame.

One solution is to convert all my remaining dialog boxes to JFrames, but that would take a lot of time since I have all sort of dialog boxes. And then linking everything together will be time consuming.

So is there a function or code that I can tell Java...to give the user the power to interact with JFrame "Status Bar" while a dialog box is presented on the screen.

I Hope I am making sense. Please ask if something is not clear. I appreciate the help.

If you're using Java 6, you can use the new modality settings.

Modality in dialogs

Depending on your GUI design, you may wish to make the dialogs Document modal as opposed to modeless(equivalent to setModal(false)). Note that this will only work if the dialogs are shown in a different root container than the Progress JFrame.

Another option is to set a modal exclusion on the JFrame you want to be always visible. This way your dialogs can still block other frames and you don't need to remember to setModal(false) everytime you add a new dialog:

progressFrame.setModalExclusionType(Dialog.ModalExclusionType.APPLICATION_EXCLUDE);

Call setModal(false) method on all dialogues so that you will be able to go to JFrame while JDialog is open.