First an apology, in a previous post I committed the Usenet sin of
asking "How do I do X" when I really wanted to know "How do I do Y" - I
thought that doing X was the way to achieve Y.

I have a JTable displayed in the usual way. One of the editable columns
contains short codes. This is for brevity, to conserve space. So the
codes are shown in a narrow column.

However I wanted the table cell editor to allow the user to pick from a
list of the long names for these codes. I think this would help people
who are not familiar with the short codes.

For the TableCellEditor I tried using a JComboBox that shows the names
instead of the codes. It became obvious that the JComboBox width is
constrained by the table column width and so is normally not wide enough
to show the long names.

So - is there some other widget I can use in conjunction with a JTable
for this?

Would it be wiser to have a normal editor for the short codes but have
available some method (e.g. a keyboard shortcut) that will popup some
more elaborate "chooser" JDialog of my own devising?