How do I make an ActionEvent and a KeyEvent fire the same action?

Question

I'm writing an applet and want to figure out how to make a button and a key event cover the same bit of code. For this question, I'll call this button fireButton. The code for the action event would of course look like this:

public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
   if (e.getSource() == fireButton) {
      //all the code that pressing button executes
   }  
}

Now, I want pressing the 'enter' key to perform the same code that the action event handles, but I do not want to rewrite all the code again in a keyPressed method.

To be specific, I'm writing a battleship program, and the 'Fire' button takes input from two textFields, handles exceptions, and passes the input as parameters to a method that fires at a particular square in the grid. Ideally, pressing the enter key would function the same way as if I had pressed the fire button. Is there a way to make a certain method call an actionPerformed method? If not, what would be an elegant solution to the problem?

Answer 1

1. Create an Action
2. Add the Action to the JButton
3. Use Key Bindings to bind the Enter key to the Action

Read the Swing tutorial. There are sections on:

1. How to Use Actions
2. How to Use Key Bindings

If you are just talking about invoking the "Fire" button with the enter key then check out Enter Key and Button for a couple of approaches.

Answer 2

I suggest you put all the code in a separate method that receives all the relevant data from the event (if any) as parameters:

public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
    if (e.getSource() == fireButton) {
        Object relevantData0 = new Object(); // e.getSomething();
        Object relevantData1 = new Object(); // e.getSomethingElse();
        handleFireAction(relevantData1, relevantData2);
    }
}  

public void actionPerformed(KeyEvent e) {
    if (e.getSource() == fireButton) {
        Object relevantData0 = new Object(); // e.getSomething();
        Object relevantData1 = new Object(); // e.getSomethingElse();
        handleFireAction(relevantData1, relevantData2);
    }
}  

private void handleFireAction(Object relevantData0, Object relevantData1) { // Object relevantDat2, and so on
    //all the code that pressing button executes
}  

If you don't need any data from the event its even easier ;) This way you just write your code once for both events. It's a general OO aproach.
Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Borrowing from MVC I would recommend you have a controller class which handles these sorts of requests. Then all you have to do is delegate to the controller in each event handler.

Like so:

public class BattleShipController {

   public void handleFireAction() {
   // ...
   }
}

//-- in your UI class(es)
private BattleShipController _controller = new BattleShipController();

//-- in event calls:
_controller.handleFireAction();

If you post relevant code I can make further suggestions.