I'm trying to have my Swing components not scale either vertically and scale horizontally, or the other way around (In other words, I only want them to have one axis of freedom. They can either scale horizontally in some cases, or vertically in others).
Is there any elegant way of doing this, without adding a multitude of JPanels?
LE: I'd rather not make any significant modifications to the already made layout that I've received.
I'm hoping for a magical, simple fix to this issue, like JTextField.don'tScaleVerticallyIdiot();
You need to use an appropriate layout manager.
The two most powerful are MigLayout and FormLayout. I personally prefer MigLayout because it's easier to use directly, whereas FormLayout works well only with a window designer like WindowBuilder.
Both have similar feature characteristics.
Using MigLayout, you can specify if a component is allowed to grow on a specific axis, and if so, what kind of weight it should be provided (as opposed to extra space going to other components).
I think you can achieve that with setting BorderLayout as a LayoutManager of the container, so:
Adding swing component on BorderLayout.EAST will make it scalable vertically only.
Adding swing component on BorderLayout.WEST will make it scalable vertically only.
Adding swing component on BorderLayout.NORTH will make it scalable horizontally only.
Adding swing component on BorderLayout.SOUTH will make it scalable horizontally only.
Adding swing component on BorderLayout.CENTER will make it scalable both horizontally and vertically.
You didn't mention which LayoutManager that you are currently using.
Personally, I would use GridBagLayout for what you are trying to achieve.
I want it to be a single row as height and scale horizontally as much as I drag the frame, but without adding multiple JPanels.
I think BoxLayout with a PAGE_AXIS can do that.
Related
Okay, I am kind of desperate right now. I hope you guys can help.
I need to layout content panels with Java Swing. The Problem is, that every content is different. So I need a panel that resize itself for every content. Basically what LayoutManagers are invented for.
I need a left panel and a right panel. The widths of the panels should be fixed. The heights should adjust to the given content
|<---- 30% ------->|<----- 70% -------------------->|
Easy going I thought, but it just wont work. I tried different layout managers. Some of them keep the 30% rule, but doesn't wrap the content and just display them in one single line (BorderLayout).
If a LayoutManager does support line-break (even if its just for HTML text but that is fine for me) it wont support the fixed width. A combination of both didn't worked for me either.
Note that I need to stick to Swing and can not use another more advanced library because the system I am developing for is stuck to Java 1.5. Furthermore, I know the total screenwidth so I could calculate the width of the panels to work with fixed widths, but I need to be flexible with the height.
You can achieve this by using nested BorderLayouts. Start by setting your Panel's layout as BorderLayout.
After that, for each left and right panels, set layouts as BorderLayout again. At this level, you will set %30 and %70 ratio.
Within this layouts, add your contents to NORTH layouts. This will enable your panels' height to match given content.
Not sure if what I need is possible.
I have a container (JPanel) that contains some internal elements.
I was wondering if it is possible to force internal elements to fit into the container's size.
I need them to be fully visible i.e., resize to fit inside the Panel's size and not cut some parts of the internal elements.
Scrolling is not an option.
Is this possible by using a Layout or something?
EDIT: Important clarification:
The thing is that I do not have access to the internal elements neither to their properties so I would say that a Layoutmanager capable of resizing child elements to fit to its size is needed. I tested BorderLayout and GridBagLayout but the result is always the same, the internal elements are cut out.
It's for exactly that reason that LayoutManagers exist. All the LayoutManagers work for simple containers directly, excluding GridBagLayout which is to able to handle most complete GUIs directly.
For most complete GUI's you have some choices as follows:
Look for a 3rd party layout such as MigLayout or here
Use GridBagLayout
Very easy way is use nested layout, where there is more than one JPanel and each has child JPanels with the same or different LayoutManager
Or custom layout, should be hard..., but same as using GridBagLayout
You could set the JPanel layout to border layout, then add the single child to the center. If there are multiple children, this approach becomes less useful since components added to the the NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, and WEST will remain statically sized while the centre resizes to fill the remainder.
In short, this isn't an ideal solution. All layouting in Swing is made all the more complex by the fact that different components behave in different ways, so you really need to provide further details of the child components you wish to add to your panel, and any behaviour that has been overridden on those components.
The best way is to try a couple of simple examples to see what mileage you get and whether subtle redesign of your child component nesting could help.
you can use a layout, like GridBagLayout, or BorderLayout depending on the situation. With proper weights it is possible.
this sounds to me like you should just peek an appropriate layout manager and use it. For example, look at BorderLayout - put your component in the CENTER and it will occupy all the area. Its up to each concrete layout manager to decide what will be the size of the components.
Mark
I was using a JInternalFrame inside JDesktopPane. I wanted the internal_frame to auto resize as desktop pane is resized, so I had to implement the AncestorResized event for the internal frame where I placed the following code:
this.setPreferredSize(this.getParent().getPreferredSize());
this.pack();
I am trying to make something like the above, a frame that consists of many JButton components (gray rectangles). These buttons are of the exact shape but their positioning looks like the picture. I am new to AWT, Swing and such and don't know what layout should I use, I know a bit of GridLayout and BorderLayout which are obviously not suitable in this case.
Any ideas?
I think its better to use GridBagLayout. GridBagLayout is a sophisticated, flexible layout manager. It aligns components by placing them within a grid of cells, allowing components to span more than one cell. The rows in the grid can have different heights, and grid columns can have different widths. For further details, see How to Use GridBagLayout. For more details - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/visual.html#gridbag
I strongly recommend you to use Grid Bag Layout, with this layout you can make good looking GUI or strange GUI in most cases. In your problem Check insets in Grid Bag layout, this layout is kind of tricky but if you will learn it, you will see that it is simple.
I am making a gui application where I need a wide panel on one side of the frame, and a thinner panel on the other. The panels are the same height, but when I re-size them I want them to keep a consistent width difference from each other while still changing size.
Here is what it would look like when restored to a smaller size:
And here is what it would look like when it was maximized or made bigger:
I was trying to use Grid Layout for this, but I couldn't quite figure out how to make one smaller and change at a lesser rate when you were making the window bigger. My question is which layout would get me to what I want, and what functions within the layout manager would lead me to the result?
You could use GridBagLayout, but that always seems more trouble than its worth.
Instead, take a look at JGoodies, especially their FormLayout. It's been years since I've done Swing programming, but remember the JGoodies layouts making life a lot easier.
I'm building a PropertyPanel. Currently I'm using a GridLayout to manage the JLabels and their corresponding fields where I can specify the value. But the problem is that the GridLayout automatically manages the size of the columns: it makes them the same width.
This means when I'm having a big value field, the colum, is getting bigger (which is good), but the other column (with all my JLabels) is getting bigger as well. Here is a screenshot:
< BAD
As you can see, the image property has a huge value, which makes both columns bigger, and I'm having a lot of space after the JLabels.
So, I'm searching for a LayoutManager which makes each column as big as necessary.
I want a layout like this (it's edited with Gimp):
< GOOD
Thanks
You can use SpringLayout for this. See How to Use SpringLayout.
Example layout:
Remember that you also can nest layouts.
SpringLayout is what I typically use for forms like this. Although I think GridBagLayout would also work nicely.
I tend to try to hack everything by mixing GridLayout and BorderLayout, so maybe it's not the best solution but...
Create two GridLayouts, both have a single column. One for the labels the other for the controls.
Now create a BorderLayout to be the parent.
Add the left grid to the BorderLayout.WEST and the right grid to the BorderLayout.CENTER.
While this was answered 11 hours ago, I just thought I'd pop in & make a suggestion. I suggest GroupLayout.
I was looking to break from nested layouts for a name/value dialog recently and looked at both GroupLayout & SpringLayout. It seemed the only advantage offered by SpringLayout was that it could achieve the right aligned text of the labels (there may be a way to do it using GL, but I couldn't figure out how). On the downside, the Java Tutorial examples for SpringLayout used a whopping 'helper class' to define layout constraints.
In the end (it was only a very short 'study') I chose to use GroupLayout.
Consider using MigLayout. If constrained within the current JDK, GridBagLayout.
Here's an overview of the standard LayoutManagers:
http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/visual.html
You could e.g. use GridBagLayout or the non-standard MigLayout, if you want to code the GUI by hand.
If you want to use a GUI builder (e.g. the one in NetBeans) you could use the GroupLayout.