Change color of JButton when selected, & Set mask on JFormattedTextField?

I'm writing my 1st Java program (in Netbeans) and I'm lost. I have 2 questions at the moment, if anyone is kind enough to help me.

Here's what the program is supposed to do:

take 1 of 4 "status" options, plus a 5 digit number (both of these items are entered by a user via a touch-screen monitor) and then email this info to someone with the subject line of: "Item #[5 digit number from JFormattedTextField] is currently [1 of 4 possible status options].

Email command would command after user clicks "enter" button, and then user clicks "OK" on a pop-up which asks user to confirm message about to be emailed. As far as my 3rd question, it's about the e-mailing part, and I figured that would be a another thread after I get this button & text field stuff ironed out.

Here's a picture of the touch screen UI I have so far: (can't post images as a rookie, go to krisbunda.com/gui.png for this image)

Question #1: the 4 status options (4 JButtons) are wrapped inside of a JPanel. I want the most recent button to have been pushed in t开发者_运维问答he "statusPanel" JPanel to change the background to blue and the button text to white.

Can I put a mouselistener on the button's parent JPanel to listen for click events on the children (the 4 status JButtons), and then whichever button was last clicked, it will turn blue w/ white text? Please point me in the right direction.

Question #2: I have a JFormattedTextField named "display" that shows the numbers as they're clicked, which are appended from a StringBuffer named "current". I want the text field to only accept a total of 5 numbers.

When I tried putting a mask of "#####" on the field, it would only chime a warning beep when I pushed the number pad's buttons. Currently I've chosen "Category: number" and "Format: custom" and then typed "#####" in the "Format:" field. This allows me to click number buttons and see their text displayed, but it doesn't stop me from typing more than 5 characters.

I'm doing this through the "Properties> FormatterFactory" dialog box. A screen shot is shown below: (go to krisbunda.com/text-formatterFactory.png to view this image)

And here's the code I have so far: (my post was too long with this code, so go to: krisbunda.com/java-sampleCode.txt to view)

Thanks in advance for any help!

Your code looks fine, and you already have fields set up to hold references to all your buttons, so now you just need to write the code inside the status setting buttons and then make them call a subroutine with the new status. This subroutine should then reset all the buttons to their default color and then set the special selected color on the button that corresponds to the new or existing status.

Edit: adding code here in response to your comment...

Firstly, never use == with Strings. You MUST use equals() otherwise when you get two Strings that are identical, but are different objects, they will not be the same and your comparisons will fail.

There are much better ways of coding this up, including using enums etc. but this should work for you:

// Reset all the buttons
outsideNotReadyButton.setBackground(...);
loadedButton.setBackground(...);
outsideReadyButton.setBackground(...);
shippedButton.setBackground(...);

// Now set the one of the button's colors conditionally
String status = ...

if(status.equals("SHIPPED")) {shippedButton.setBackground(Color.BLUE);}
else if(status.equals("LOADED")) {loadedButton.setBackground(Color.BLUE);}
// ...and so on

1. An ActionListener is the more common approach to buttons, as discussed in How to Use Buttons, etc. A FocusListener, also used in this example, is one way to change a button's appearance in the way you describe.

2. An sscce showing just your JFormattedTextField problem will be more helpful. Several such examples may be found in the article How to Use Formatted Text Fields.