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paul
paul

Reputation: 11

Javafx button stays "enabled"

I've started to learn Javafx and I happened upon this "strange" feature. I've made a simple window with two buttons. When I press one of them a blue stroke appears and stays there until I press the other button. I can't find any logical use of this other than knowing which button was pressed last. Even from a UX perspective, it doesn't make sense. I've tried somehow to "deactivate" it throught CSS but no luck. Is there any solution for this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2081

Answers (2)

jewelsea
jewelsea

Reputation: 159281

The blue outline around controls in JavaFX is there to indicate which control has focus.

Focus indicators are a common idiom used across different UI frameworks, not specific to just JavaFX. In a traditional mouse/keyboard based input setup, there needs to be some indication of where a keystroke will be sent when a key is pressed. Imagine there are multiple fields on a form, a few text fields and a couple of buttons. If the user types some characters - how does the system know into which text field to insert the characters? Similarly if the user presses return to activate a button, which button will get activated? The answer is that the button or field which currently has focus will receive the input. The focus can be changed usually by pressing the tab key to tab to a new field or pressing on a different field with the mouse. However, even though the system knows that which field has focus, it is important to provide feedback to the user to let the user know which field has focus. That way when the user types, they have some idea of where there input will be directed.

What you see with a blue outline around a button in JavaFX is a visual indicator to note that the button has focus and, if you press space, that button's action will be triggered and not some other button. When you click the mouse on another button it will both trigger the other button's action and transfer focus to that button, so if you subsequently press space, the last clicked button will be actioned again.

The focus color for a controls in JavaFX that are using the default modena.css stylesheet which comes with JavaFX 8, can be controlled by a couple of css properties which you can override in the user stylesheet for your application (by defining the properties in the .root {} css style class:

/* A bright blue for the focus indicator of objects. Typically used as the
 * first color in -fx-background-color for the "focused" pseudo-class. Also
 * typically used with insets of -1.4 to provide a glowing effect.
 */
-fx-focus-color: #039ED3;
-fx-faint-focus-color: #039ED322;

So, for instance, you could remove all focus colors from your application using:

.root {
    -fx-focus-color: transparent;
    -fx-faint-focus-color: transparent;
}

However, removing focus color indicators would probably make your application much less intuitive and more difficult to understand.

Let's look at a simple form in JavaFX:

form

The blue ring around the text input field for User Name indicates that text input will go into that field.

Is there a proper way to disable the focus ring only from my project's buttons?

If you want to disable focus feedback only for buttons and for all buttons in a project and also not effect other controls, then you can define a stylesheet rule for that:

.button {
    -fx-focus-color: transparent;
    -fx-faint-focus-color: transparent;
}

Note: I still don't recommend doing this even if other frameworks you use do not provide focus rings for buttons.

This will override the default focus coloring for buttons defined in the default JavaFX 8 modena.css stylesheet. You do not need to (nor should you) modify the modena.css stylesheet to override values in it. You can just redefine the values using a more specific CSS selector rule within your application's stylesheet. If you need to understand how CSS selectors work, there are numerous resources on the web you can search for and read. Oracle provide a getting started tutorial on how you can set a custom CSS style for a scene. The relevant code line is to add your user stylesheet to your scene:

scene.getStylesheets().add(
    MyApplication.class.getResource(
        "my-stylesheet.css"
    ).toExternalForm()
);

Upvotes: 1

Florian Fritz
Florian Fritz

Reputation: 78

It's hard to tell what you are searching for without the code. But I think you are referring to the visual marker for the currently focused menu item. This function is used in situations where the user hit's the "Tab"-Key to navigate through your menu items.

You can disable this feature for items by unchecking the "Focus Traversable" option in the "Properties" Tab. This will also disable the tab navigation!

There is already a thread that has a solution for exactly this topic. See:Remove Focus Box Around TextField

It talks about disabling the focus color using css, while keeping the tab navigation feature by using this css styling rule:

-fx-focus-color: transparent;

(Source: Uluk Biy's answer in the linked topic)

Upvotes: 1

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