RequestFocus in TextField doesn’t work

I use JavaFX 2.1 and I created GUI using FXML, in the controller of this GUI I added myTextField.requestFocus();.

But I always get the focus in the other control.

Answer

At the time of initialize() controls are not yet ready to handle focus.

You can try next trick:

@Override
public void initialize(URL url, ResourceBundle rb) {
    Platform.runLater(new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            tf.requestFocus();
        }
    });
}

For tricky complex applications (like Pavel_K has in the comments) you may want to repeat this routine several times and call method line next one:

private void requestFocusOrDieTrying(Node node) {
    Platform.runLater(() -> {
        if (!node.isFocused()) {
            node.requestFocus();
            requestFocusOrDieTrying(node);
        }
    });
}

Note this is the undocumented approach and it may be wise to add a limit for repetitions to avoid endless loop if something changed or broke in future Java releases. Better to lose focus than a whole app. 🙂

---

Example with the described threshold:

@Override
public void requestFocus() {
  requestFocus( getNode(), 3 );
}

private void requestFocus( final Node node, final int max ) {
  if( max > 0 ) {
    runLater(
        () -> {
          if( !node.isFocused() ) {
            node.requestFocus();
            requestFocus( node, max - 1 );
          }
        }
    );
  }
}