Swing/AWT/SWT :: How To Use Container Order Focus Traversal Policy

the focus traversal policy (hereafter "tab order") in forms and panels doesn't follow the order in which controls were inserted into the container, but is derived from the position of the components on the form or panel. This is very neat (and probably allows sloppy coders and GUI builders to exist without actually ever thinking about the tab order), except when it isn't. As when you actually want to specify a different component order, for example.

In the following example, I've created a form with two columns of buttons. I want the tab order to go through the first column of buttons, followed by second column of buttons (ie. a column-by-column schema). The default tab order is row-by-row, however, and can be obtained for reference by commenting out the setupFocus() call in the constructor.

I had hoped that the ContainerOrderFocusTraversalPolicy would do the job, but there is a couple of problems (which I've addressed in the setupFocus() method). Firstly, the container itself is part of the focus chain. This at least is easily remediable by calling setFocusable(false), but I don't have to do that with the initial focus traversal policy, so I wonder why I have to do it with this one. The other problem is more pressing, though - the ContainerOrderFocusTraversalPolicy lets me (un)hapilly tab through JLabels. Again, I've fixed this, but the initial policy knows all by itself that it's not a good idea to focus a JLabel. Moreover, I'm afraid there might be other components that do not receive focus with the original policy, but ContainerOrderFocusTraversalPolicy might plod though them.

isn't there some focus traversal policy implementation that I could just set and it would tab through exactly the same components as the original policy, except it would order them according to their order in the container?

Code:

package test;
import java.awt.Component;
import java.awt.ContainerOrderFocusTraversalPolicy;
import java.awt.GridBagConstraints;
import java.awt.GridBagLayout;
import java.awt.Insets;
import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JDialog;
import javax.swing.JLabel;
import javax.swing.SwingUtilities;

[code]...