The only way to completely prevent a selection in a JTable component is to prevent it from getting the focus using setFocusable(false). However, if you still need keystrokes to work in the component, this method is not an option.
The next closest way to disable selections is to call setCellSelectionEnabled(false). After this call, isCellSelected() correctly returns false for every cell. However, getSelectedRows() and getSelectedColumns() do not return empty arrays as expected. Instead, the anchor cell (e944 Getting the Anchor Cell in a JTable Component) will be considered selected. Therefore, if you are using these methods, make sure you ignore the results if getCellSelectionEnabled() returns false.
int rows = 10;
int cols = 5;
JTable table = new JTable(rows, cols);
// Do this only if there's no need for the component to have the focus
table.setFocusable(false);
// Partially disables selections (see description above)
table.setCellSelectionEnabled(false);
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