TableAssistant provides a popup through which the columns of the table can be dynamically added/removed. The popup is shown upon right-clicking on the table header.

You can make the popup menu to show upon right-click mouse events on the header by calling TableAssistant's method:

public void setShowPopup(boolean showPopup);

You can also determine if the popup will be shown by calling:

public boolean getShowPopup();

Finally, an instance of the popup menu can be retrieved by calling:

public JPopupMenu getColumnPopup();

Example: Make the popup menu visible.

JPopupMenu popup = tableAssistant.getColumnPopup();

popup.setVisible(true);