Core Swing Components - The Definitive Guide to Java Swing - page 88

Figure 4-7. Various JLabel alignments
Figure 4-8. Various JLabel text positions
JLabel Event Handling
No event-handling capabilities are specific to the JLabel . Besides the event-handling capabilities
inherited through JComponent , the closest thing there is for event handling with the JLabel is the
combined usage of the displayedMnemonic , displayedMnemonicIndex , and labelFor properties.
When the displayedMnemonic and labelFor properties are set, pressing the keystroke specified
by the mnemonic, along with the platform-specific hotkey (usually Alt), causes the input focus
to shift to the component associated with the labelFor property. This can be helpful when a
component doesn't have its own manner of displaying a mnemonic setting, such as with all the
text input components. Here is an example, which results in the display shown in Figure 4-9:
JLabel label = new JLabel("Username");
JTextField textField = new JTextField();
label.setDisplayedMnemonic(KeyEvent.VK_U);
label.setLabelFor(textField);
Figure 4-9. Using a JLabel to display the mnemonic for another component