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JDialog doesn't respect dimensions of child components

I have a setup that usually works, but I'm finding it a bit of a pain at the moment.
I have a JDialog (formerly a JFrame, but I've changed the UI flow recently to remove redundant JFrames) set to BorderLayout that contains three main JPanels, header, content and footer.
The header JPanel has a background image that is loading fine. However, I'm calling all manner of setMinimumSize / setPreferredSize / etc (I even tried setSize and setBounds out of desperation) and the JPanel isn't being sized correctly. The layout for that component is BoxLayout, and the children sit comfortably within it, but that shouldn't affect what I'm trying to do with the header panel itself.
The only thing that works is setting a size on the parent JDialog. But I don't want to do that / from what I've read it seems like bad design. I'd also have to maths out the potential width / height of all the children, add the margins, etc.
Advice I am not looking for: "use a different LayoutManager."
I want to understand if there's a reason for the child components not being respected.
I can provide code, but isolating a small, runnable segment is difficult given the amount of interlocked systems I'm juggling. Here is the relevant snippet to set the size of the JPanel. The image dimensions are 480 * 96.
public JPanelThemed(BufferedImage image) {
super();
this.backgroundImage = image;
setAllSimilarConstraints(new Dimension(image.getWidth(), image.getHeight()));
setOpaque(false);
}
// for use with BoxLayout as it requires explicit bounds to be set
public void setAllSimilarConstraints(Dimension dim) {
setPreferredSize(dim);
setMinimumSize(dim);
setMaximumSize(dim);
}

I would implement it a bit another way - to ensure that preferred/min/max/Size can not be changed from elsewhere:
public JPanelThemed(BufferedImage image) {
this.backgroundImage = image;
setOpaque(false);
}
public Dimension getPreferredSize() {
return new Dimension(this.backgroundImage.getWidth(), this.backgroundImage.getHeight());
}

If I don't define dimensions, how do I ensure the whole background I'm painting is displayed?
You could use a JLabel to display the ImageIcon. The size of the label will be the size of the image. You then set the layout manager of the label so you can add components to it.
Edit:
do you know why it's commonly-recommended to subclass JPanel when painting backgrounds in Java
When you use a JPanel the size of the panel is based on the components added to the panel and the layout manager you are using. Your custom painting code then needs to paint the image the way your want. That is you can paint the image from (0, 0), or you can center the image on the panel, you can scale the image to make it fit the pane, but the image in no way controls the size of the panel, unless you override the getPreferredSize() method of the panel to use custom code to base the size of the larger of the components or the image. So you are in full control.
When you use the JLabel approach suggested here, the size of the label is always the size of the image. Then components will be positioned based on the layout manager but can be truncated if the image is smaller than the space required by the components.
So based on your requirement that you want to make sure the entire image is displayed, I suggested the JLabel approach, since you don't need to write any custom code. I find this a simple approach when using popup non-resizable dialogs to display a background image and a few components and buttons to close the dialog.
You can also check out Background Panel which provides these common painting features in a reusable class.

Resizing Behaviour of JFrame

I have a JFrame and I would like to change its resizing behaviour.
More specifically, when I drag the JFrame to the right I want it to resize as if I was dragging it from the diagonal. So when I drag it to the right, the default behavior is that only the width increases and when I drag it from the diagonal both the width and the height increase. How can I override the behaviour so that when dragging to the right behaves as I was dragging it from the diagonal.
Many thanks in advanced.

You could add a ComponentListener to the JFrame and then manually resize the height to the same proportion as the width in the componentResized method.
Don't know if it is the best way, but that would work.

What I think you would want to do is make a component listener or a component adapter. When the frame is moved you could increase the size both vertically or horizontal depending on which direction the frame moved.

Java Swing - Dynamic List that Fills Available Space?

This doesn't seem like it should be very hard but I can't figure out how to do this:
I have a subclass of JPanel. It has a fixed height, but can be any width. The subclasses, on construction, set their preferred size using setPreferredSize(), which means I have to provide a width in addition to the height.
I would like to make a scrolling list of some number of my subclass, where the subclasses all fill the available horizontal space.
Right now I have a scroll view containing a JPanel containing my subclasses. The containing JPanel uses a BoxLayout with a vertical orientation.
Vertically, it looks great. Horizontally, my custom panels are just stuck at the preferred size. What would be the easiest way to make my panels fill the available horizontal space? I tried writing some layout listeners for them, but the performance was flakey (it seems that sometimes the event messages get dropped?) and the code looked hacky. Other views, such as the JList, JTree, and scroll views seem to resize automatically to fill the available space in a BoxLayout, so I feel like there must be something I can do in my JPanel subclass that I haven't thought of.
I'm open to using another Layout Manager if something else is better suited for this. I looked at GridBagLayout, but that seemed more geared towards static layouts where components aren't added and removed at runtime.
Edit: I found this on Oracle's Documentation for BoxLayout which has an example that looks exactly like what I want:
What if none of the components has a maximum width? In this case, if all the components have identical X alignment, then all components are made as wide as their container. If the X alignments are different, then any component with an X alignment of 0.0 (left) or 1.0 (right) will be smaller. All components with an intermediate X alignment (such as center) will be as wide as their container. Here are two examples:
Could someone show me the code that will produce the same results? The example code in the documentation doesn't look like it covers this particular picture.

When you put your component in a JScrollPane, your component may implement the Scrollable interface to adjust the scrollpane’s behaviour. By doing this you can implement the method getScrollableTracksViewportWidth() to return true so your component will always have the available width and be scrollable in vertical direction only.
This is how JList, JTable, JTree, and all the text components of Swing do it.

Alright - I found the problem. It appears that the default implementation of getMinimumSize() and getMaximumSize() will simply return the value of getPreferredSize() if it is set. So by setting a preferred size without a maximum size, my maximum size was the preferred size. By overriding getMaximumSize() to return (99999, preferredHeight), it now works exactly as I want.

Limiting a JScrollPane's scroll range

I have a JTextArea wrapped in a JScrollPane, which I use to log my application's output. I'm using the default, plain font with a size of 9 for the text area, and the scroll pane's height is 48 px. This results in an even distribution of lines in the scroll pane view, but there's a problem: if you scroll all the way up or all the way down, this happens:
As you can see, the top line got cut off, which is why I'm wondering if there's a way to limit the scroll pane's scroll range so it, for example, can't reach the top or bottom 6 pixels. Alternative solutions are also welcome.

You could change the margin (top/bottom) of your JTextArea by setting a custom Border using the method setBorder inherited from JComponent. The documentation for JComponent suggests the following:
Although technically you can set the border on any object that
inherits from JComponent, the look and feel implementation of many
standard Swing components doesn't work well with user-set borders. In
general, when you want to set a border on a standard Swing component
other than JPanel or JLabel, we recommend that you put the component
in a JPanel and set the border on the JPanel.
That would yield the same result as limiting the scroll range, while being more straight forward.
EDIT:
OP reported that the following solution worked for him:
textAreaLog.setBorder(BorderFactory.createEmptyBorder(0, 6, 0, 6));

Place the JTextArea in a JPanel with empty borders where top and bottom insets are 6 pixels?

JPanel size by inner components

Is it possible to tell JPanel to set its size to fit all components that it contains? Something like pack() for JFrame.
edit: The trick with preferredSize didn't help. I've got JSplitPane, where in one part there is GridBagLayout with many labels (see screenshot) and labels overlap each other.
screenshot http://foto.darth.cz/pictures/screen.png

After looking at the source code for pack(), I came up with:
panel.setPreferredSize(panel.getPreferredSize());
This forces the panel to recalculate its preferred size based on the preferred sizes of its subcomponenents.
You may or may not have to call validate() afterward; in my tiny example, it seemed to make no difference, but the Javadoc says:
The validate method is used to cause a container to lay out its subcomponents again. It should be invoked when this container's subcomponents are modified (added to or removed from the container, or layout-related information changed) after the container has been displayed.
So I guess it depends on why you're having to repack your JPanel.

By default Containers have a preferred size that matches the preferred layout size given by the container. So literally all you have to do is:
panel.setSize(panel.getPreferredSize());
Presumably you are doing something odd with the parent to stop the parent's layout manager doing the equivalent of this.

maybe you can do something like that by removing from your panel
setResizable(false);

I would try:
panel.revalidate();
panel.repaint();
This will not necessarily set the panel to its preferred size, that is more dependent on what the layout manager decides to use.
This is useful in cases where you have added/removed components from a panel that is currently displayed and visible.
Update:
Based on your screenshot I can say the following:
1) Consider programatically changing the divider location.
2) Consider programatically resizing the window itself horizontally since it seems to be a little tight to show both sides of the split pane.
Or both.
You can set the divider location by doing
splitPane.setDividerLocation(newSize);
Keep in mind that there are two overloaded methods for this, one taking a float one taking an int. The float does a percentage of the size while the int is the size in pixels. The size is for the left hand panel (or top panel for that orientation).
I would consider possibly changing the divider location based on the preferred width of the panels.

The javax.swing mysteries reveal themselves only gradually, and only to those who are prepared to offer many libations (particularly torn out clumps of hair, hours burning the midnight oil, etc.) to the gods of Swing.
However, for this case in point I would suggest the following as a sort of Swiss army knife which usually does what you think the framework should do anyway:
myJPanel.getTopLevelAncestor().validate()
As the sacred text says, "Validates this container and all of its subcomponents." (Container.validate). NB getTopLevelAncestor() is a JComponent method.
Can't remember how JSplitPane fits into this: try it and you'll probably find that it validates both components (right and left, top and bottom), but I would be surprised if changing the divider doesn't do this for you anyway.

I had a similar issue using Netbeans GUI Builder. My inner panels were getting weird sizes; I was trying to adjust the minimum and preferred sizes manually, which was a frustrating exercise.
The problem was solved when I reset all the minimum and preferred sizes back to default (In Netbeans GUI Builder: right click JPanel component -> Properties -> preferredSize -> Reset to Default). When there is no imposed size, the jpanel takes the size of the inner component.
Note: GridBaLayout was used in my case

JSplitPanes are a bit fussy when it comes to its children's sizes, have a look at the Java tutorial. Are you using the GridBagLayout correctly? Looks like it's not setting the right JPanel's minimum size properly.

Here's an example of a panel which:
Resizes with it's parent.
Sets the width to the width of the parent.
Sets the height according to sum of the height of all of it's children.
JPanel panel = JPanel(new GridBagLayout())
panel.setMaximumSize(new Dimension(panel.getMaximumSize().width, panel.getPreferredSize().height))
panel.validate()
panel.repaint()