How do I get my netbeans drag and drop widget to know whether it is rendering inside the netbeans design view window or the running application?

Question: Why would you want this?

Answer: In case you are doing custom animation that will go outside the bounds of the component.

This is how:

public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
    super.paintComponent(g);
    if (super.getRootPane().getParent() instanceof JFrame) {
        Component c = javax.swing.SwingUtilities.getRoot(this);
        String className = c.getClass().getCanonicalName();
        if (!"org.netbeans.core.windows.view.ui.MainWindow".equalsIgnoreCase(className)) {
            JFrame parentFrame = (JFrame) super.getRootPane().getParent();
            ...
        }else {
            // Inside Netbeans demo window
        }
    }
}

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Addenum
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This is a simpler way I've just been made aware of:

java.beans.Beans.isDesignTime()

Here is an example of it in use:

package test;

import java.awt.Graphics;
import java.beans.Beans;

import javax.swing.JLabel;

public class TestLabel extends JLabel {
    private static final long serialVersionUID = -2438507032083091628L;

    public TestLabel() {
        super();
    }

    public void paint(Graphics g) {
        super.paint(g);

        if (Beans.isDesignTime()) 
                this.setText("Design Time");
        else
                this.setText("Production runtime");
    }
}