I'm trying to auto resize the left side of my application. I have a JTextField and a JTree on the left and 3 JButtons on the right. But I just don't know how to make the left side auto resizeable.
I did it with the Netbeans GUI Creator (or whatever it is called) but I don't know how to to it without Netbeans. (I usually don't program with Netbeans, this was just an exception to see if it's even possible to do so with Swing.
Here is the code Netbeans created: http://pastebin.com/ERwY4rBC
It's not that the code is completely unusable but I wanted to try it manually.
The GroupLayout looks nice, but the Oracle site says it's mainly for the use for GUI tools. So, using GroupLayout would be not "Java like" or how do I have to understand it? Or is there even a better way to achieve this without GroupLayout?
Thanks!
So, using GroupLayout would be not "Java like" or how do I have to understand it
GroupLayout is to put it simply really hard to hand-code, and results mostly in a lot of code. But it is not "not Java like", it is just not something you want to do by hand, and the code afterwards is hard to read as it is rather verbose.
What you try to achieve (according to the screenshot) is easily achievable using some 'nested layouts'. If your main panel uses a BorderLayout where you put the left, resizable panel in the BorderLayout.CENTER and the other, non-resizable panel in the BorderLayout.EAST you will obtain the desired resize behavior.
Then you just have to decide which LayoutManager to use for those individual panels. I think that both the BoxLayout as well as the FlowLayout will do just fine.
Do yourself a favour and use MigLayout for all your layout needs. It is especially convenient for coding UI by hand.
There is a WebStart application on their site that demos different layout situations with code samples provided.
Related
I am a self-taught java developer and I use IntelliJ IDEA for Java. Recently I saw a video on youtube in which the guy was using NetBeans and in his JFrame form, he was able to freely place his objects like JButton, JTextFeild, JLabel, etc. I am not able to figure out how to do that. In IntelliJ IDEA I found several layout managers such as Border, Card, Grid, Bag, etc. but none of them gave the desired result. can somebody please tell me how can I get a layout manager in which I can freely place all my objects and also freely resize them without any restrictions? Thank you in advance for any help.
In swing every component extends Container. That means that every component can have nested components (they all have add(Component) method). However, not all of them support the layout-ing of nested components.
What I want to say is, that you can add a component to a JButton, but a JButton is not capable of showing its nested components.
So, in order to have nesting, we use the components - containers that support the orientation of their nested components.
These components are all windows (JFrame, JDialog, etc...) and JPanels. There some others that support layout-ing a specific type of nested components. For example a JMenu is capable of showing JMenuItems properly.
Now, these "top-level"/empty containers are using Layout Managers in order to align-show their nested components. Based on the container's layout manager, the components are shown.
This is why you can't "freely" place the components into a JFrame. Because its Layout Manager is taking care of the components will be placed. So, what you are looking for, is to change its LayoutManager (use setLayout method) to one that allows you to freely place the components.
Guess what? There is no such layout manager. Simply because, it would have nothing to do/calculate since you are taking care the layout of the components. So, in order to achieve the "free" component layout, you must use jframe.setLayout(null);. In order to layout the components after it, you will have to use componentInsideJFrame.setBounds(...) and give it constant coordinates /dimension.
This is bad practice. A very bad one when it comes to UI. Giving a component static coordinates and dimension is bad. There are some questions you have to ask yourself.
What if user resizes the window? If the window is 301x301, the center of it, is at (150,150). So you place a component at (150,150). Ok it works. Now user resizes the window and makes it 501x501. The center is now standing at (250,250). But the component is staying at (150,150). There is the solution of setResizable(false), to this kind of problems, but how often have you used "uncapable of resizing" applications? What if user wants to resize it?
I hope you get it and understood what I am trying to say.
By using layout managers, you are solving this kind of problems easily, since the layout manager will take care of the resize and calculate the new center.
Yes. I know it feels weird, but all these youtube tutorials are not teaching you the correct way to make Swing GUIs. (This is a conversation for another day, I guess)
I truly suggest you read the tutorials of Swing documentation in order to get some ideas of how layout managers work. You will really benefit from those.
Finally, I suggest you to leave outside the whole "gui-builder-tool" thing. They seem to help you building your GUI, but they are adding so much additional/useless code and most of the times they are "bad UI creation" prone. Try to code the GUI by yourself.
At first, this sounds a bit harsh, but you can always run your application and see the result of the GUI. After some mistakes, you will finally be able to imagine the GUI result by only seeing the container.setLayout(..) and container.add(...) lines.
I'm not very experienced with Java Swing Layouts. I'd like to make a layout looking like the one in the picture. Is there any easy way to understand and create layouts?
There are tutorials on the oracle website and there are wysiwyg layout-building tools that show you interactively what you are building. One of them I have personally used in the past is the Window Builder you can get as an eclipse plugin but it is by no means the only one.
In the end though what it comes down to is experience. Fool around with them, try them out, get to know them. If you dont code with them yourself it is difficult to understand them properly.
Is there any easy way to understand and create layouts?
I cannot judge what others would find easy, but my approach to laying out containers is to look for sub-sections of the GUI that would be easily done with a particular layout, then working outwards from that.
For example, it seems a single row GridLayout might be well suited to displaying the top two text panes. Then the rest of the GUI can be created by placing the panel with the two text panes into the PAGE_START constraint of a BorderLayout, with the third text pane in the CENTER and the text field in the PAGE_END.
Done.
I would like to ask if SpringLayout can do anything like absolute position because I think absolute position have problem when I maximize the frame and what do I have to use if I need to set JMenu and JToolBar and JTextField and JTable all in one line in order?
I tried to use Borderlayout but it give me very big JTextField. I tried Gridlayout it give also big JTextField I need it big but not as big as it shows up.
can SpringLayout do all the job
No. It is neither designed, nor intended to do 'all the job'.
Java GUIs might have to work on a number of platforms, on different screen resolutions & using different PLAFs. As such they are not conducive to exact placement of components. To organize the components for a robust GUI, instead use layout managers, or combinations of them1, along with layout padding & borders for white space2.
For absolute positioning, don't use a layout manager at all.
However, that's not really recommended. Usually you should use a layout that would scale.
See also this thread for more discussion.
i found note writing by java says
Note: This lesson covers writing layout code by hand, which can be
challenging. If you are not interested in learning all the details of
layout management, you might prefer to use the GroupLayout layout
manager combined with a builder tool to lay out your GUI. One such
builder tool is the NetBeans IDE. Otherwise, if you want to code by
hand and do not want to use GroupLayout, then GridBagLayout is
recommended as the next most flexible and powerful layout manager
I've made a java application in netbeans and am wondering how to have the size of the jframe half the width and height of the computer resolution and also having the components comply with this change. I tried putting code and it did make the frame half the height of the computer resolution but my components, such as buttons and textfields, stopped showing. How can I achieve this? Thanks.
(EDITED)
Set the JFrame's layout manager to GridLayout. In the properties window of the GridLayout itself (select in the navigator window) set columns to 1 and rows to 2. This should give you what you want and you won't have to get into the code.
This is the key code being called within the initComponents() method of your JFrame subclass (created by NetBeans) but it is important to understand where it is:
getContentPane().setLayout(new java.awt.GridLayout(2, 1));
I love Netbeans but you do have to understand the basics.
Good luck with your project. Swing is an awesome toolset that was way ahead of it's time.
As usual in this situation the key is using the right combination of layout managers for your containers. You're probably using NetBeans generated code (something I recommend you avoid until you are very comfortable with Swing coding), and it's probably having you use GroupLayout, a fine layout, but one that might not behave as well as you'd like on resizing components. I suggest that you go through the layout manager tutorial and try to nest JPanel containers and play with different layouts that re-size well such as GridLayout, GridBagLayout and BorderLayout to try to create the best layout that can re-size well.
I'm programming this level creator for a game me and a few of my friends are doing but as of right now the GUI is using a null layout, which I don't want to. It works fine for now, but I'm still against it and I know everyone else also encourages you to ALWAYS use a LayoutManager. I'm not really willing to compromise the design as it is right now, so I pretty much want to know if there's a LayoutManager that allows me to create a GUI that looks like this:
IT HAS TO BE IN THE STANDARD JAVA API! :)
This looks like a good job for a BorderLayout. Put the buttons inside a nested container as the NORTH element. Add the JScrollPane as the CENTER component. The grid itself looks like it is a good candidate for a GridBagLayout or perhaps a GridLayout.
Short answer, yes: GridBagLayout. But that'll be a pain to work out and debug.
Long answer: It looks to me like you could do this best with a BorderLayout, a JPanel for the JButtons, and a JTable with custom TableCellRenderers and TableCellEditors.
Check the excellent documentation available for Java by Sun itself:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/visual.html
Can you spot the GridLayout and GridBagLayout? If you put it into a scrollable container, that should do the trick.
Use GroupLayout for the overall panel and a custom paint method for the map.
I don't think many people here would recommend GroupLayout because it's more complicated than the other layout managers. I like it because it produces great scalable results, so I invested the time in understanding it. Now, I hardly use anything else - especially for user interaction panels with buttons and text fields.
For the map, though, I would create a custom MapPanel and overwrite paintComponent(). Sure you have to write your own custom scrolling algorithm, but I think that's a small benefit for not having to deal with scroll bars. You could make it so someone could just drag the mouse around and move the map. Use the mouse wheel to zoom, and make the interface very intuituve. If you want to paint scrollbars, you can do that too.
I've built several interfaces using models like this. I've built several maps for games using this model, as well as a financial market charting package. It makes it very easy to add custom functionality to do some great things that would be a nightmare to try to do in a JTable.