> On Aug 6, 2025, at 3:54 PM, John Hendrikx <john.hendr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On 06/08/2025 18:06, Martin Fox wrote: >> >> The TextField of a ComboBox or Spinner is not just an artifact of its skin. >> They are both explicitly composite controls that contains a TextField >> inside. It’s part of the API. And if you were to install some filters on the >> Scene to track Key and InputMethod events you could easily conclude that >> that TextField is the focus owner (it walks like the focus owner, it quacks >> like the focus owner). > > I disagree. A ComboBox and Spinner are primitives. Their > implementation via replacable Skins may or may not use a TextField, > that's completely up to the Skin.
As I mentioned in my earlier e-mail (in the paragraph you quoted) the TextField is part of the ComboBox and Spinner API. Accessing it is the only way to, say, attach a TextFormatter to a Spinner. Consult the docs starting at version 2.2. The proposal (lifted from WPF) is to provide a mechanism which would allow a Control to replace an event’s original target with itself. This is a low-cost way of making the control appear to be a black box at the event level. It would certainly have a lower cost than, say, trying to hide skin nodes from the rest of the scene graph. I’m not aware of any toolkit that even attempts that. > - Skins re-use listener and event handler endpoints on the Control, > leaving users baffled by events sometimes being consumed before they see > them (if they added their handler late) or after they see them (if they > were the first to add their handler, or if the Skin was replaced causing > a re-ordering -- something very interesting to deal with); for listeners > this is relatively safe, as they don't have a consumption mechanism, but > not for events -- another mistake; skin event handlers should have been > part of a separate list so there can never be any intermixing of user > and skin event handlers This is a known pain point for developers that can be fixed without re-writing the underpinnings of JavaFX (in other words, with a reasonable cost/benefit ratio). I’m not sure why it hasn’t been done already. Martin
