I am creating a game using java, and I'm not quite understanding how to lay out buttons in windows.
I wants seven columns of buttons, 10 high. Each button showing a single digit number, or grayed out. jbutton buttons[] 0-70
To the right, three squares that can show a red X (strikes) that remain visable while empty. I also need a 'Go' button and a 'Clear' button. I was thinking about the strikes in a horizontal arrangement, but very flexable on final design.
The only things defigned are the jbuttons that will hold the numbers, the rest can be built upon any advice received here.
I'm not just looking for an answer, I want to understand how it came to be. PLEASE OVERexplain how.
The Java tutorials have a very thorough chapter on layout managers. Read through it. ANd keep in mind: layout managers are meant to be combined.
For your 7x10 buttons, you definitely want to use a GridLayout. For the overall layout, you could use a BorderLayout with the grid taking up its center spaces, and the other control could go in its other spaces.
I assume you're using Swing, in which case take a look at this GridBagLayout tutorial.
Use Layout Managers. Make multiple JPanels and set an appropriate manager for each. Sounds like you need a GridLayout.
Related
I have a screen in my application. The layout of the screen is shown in the attached image file.
I have to add upto 5 labels in Panel1111. But, When I try to add labels in Panel1111, the Panel11 resizes and Panel12 shifts downwards to give space to Panel11.
I want to overlap content of Panel1111 on Panel12.
How can I achieve it?
Layout details:
Panel1 : BorderLayout
Panel11: OverLayLayout
Panel111: GridBagLayout
Using JLayeredPane. Go to Oracle Java website, and go through the tutorial: How to Use Layered Panes
Java's Layout Managers by default try to show all information that is inside them.
If you say you want two panels to overlap, this essentially means that the lower one cannot be seen fully, and also not interacted with in the hidden/overlapped part. Then, this part of the panel doesn't make sense any more. So you should probably rethink your GUI.
If you want it to overlap only at certain times, and the user can define when it should overlap and when not, then you'll need to handle that manually by using no Layout Manager at all, but position the elements yourself. Oracle provides some hints how to do that: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/none.html.
In the end, you might end up writing your own, custom Layout Manager to handle the resizing of the panels.
Note: only the the layout of Panel 1 must be manually managed. The other panels can likely be handled by a LayoutManager again.
I'm currently trying to learn JavaFX and FXML (and Java) and decided to write a textbased RPG. The basis for this was already written quite some time ago, but now I wanted to do the whole thing better. Including the visuals, that is, the GUI.
First of all: I'd like to do this using FXML. That does not mean however that I'm not interested in seeing a way using basic Java.
What I want to build is a fully dynamic GUI. No Matter how it is resized, the components (and ideally the text as well) would be at the same location, relative to the other components / window border.
The window would have some kind of top line with several buttons for saving, the menu, overview and whatnot. Below that, on the left side, would be Character information: Health, Experience, Money etc. On the right side would be the text output (using a Scrollpane) plus a text field, for user input. Below the text input/output I'd place the buttons used for actions and decisions. Bottom left corner does not contain anything, though it should be a separate area.
At first I tried using Splitpanes, not knowing that they can be resized anytime and have visible Dividers. Now I'm not sure what to do.
A Gridpane would give some of the functionality I need (separate the areas), but also does not give the flexibility I want (unless I just don't know how to do it). I couldn't get it to work. So I tried using simple Panels. But with them I couldn't figure out how to keep the panels keep their relative position and size, and how to make the Buttons stick to the borders.
So what would be the best way to go about this? GridPane? Panel? Something else I'm missing? Since I don't really know how to achieve this, any help in any direction would be highly appreciated.
Have you read the layout tutorial?
From your description, it sounds like a BorderPane might be best for the overall layout (i.e. the root of your scene graph): I'm not quite sure if you could easily make this give you the empty bottom left corner you want. Alternatively you could use a GridPane as you suggested, with appropriate ColumnConstraints and RowConstraints applied to size the cells in the pane.
I am trying to create a GUI for a program with an undefined number of rows but stay with two columns. Currently the only way I can get it to look how I want is using FlowLayout but the window of course needs to be smaller than desired. It needs to happen within one panel as well because it is being added to a tabbed pane.
What would be the best layout manager to solve the problem that is in the JDK? Or would just kind of brute forcing it with AbsoluteLayout be the best approach (as the user shouldn't really be resizing the window)?
I have attached the desired appearance.
Thanks for any help in advance.
Several layouts can do what you want. I'd suggest GridLayout (easy to use, but columns will be equal width) or GridBagLayout (harder to use, but you have lots of control). You could also use a BorderLayout and put all the fields in a sub-panel on the WEST and all the drop-downs in a sub-panel on the EAST. The difficulty with that is ensuring that the rows have the same height, since they won't be constrained by the layout itself.
The best thing to do would be to go through the Java tutorial on layouts and get up to speed on what the various layout managers can do.
Also, since you're using Swing, you could just use a JTable (as Gilbert Le Blanc suggests in his comment).
I have been working on my assignment and I need a help regarding which layout to choose while designing the label combo box and buttons using java GUI. I want things to be done in a particular manner where in one horizontal line I need labels followed by combo box followed by button in second horizontal line I want the same things with one extra button and so on for third and fourth horizontal line. Actually my concern is that I am very much new to GUI and I need a suggestion which layout to choose and how to implement it
thanks in advance
I would go with GroupLayout (use NetBeans, it has a very good GUI builder, that makes UI creation easy). If you want to try more sophisticated solution, you may check JGoodies or MigLayout.
Recently, I started creating a program for the company I work for. Just as background info, I'm still a student and a beginner programmer, so my solution is probably not recommended and I didn't know how to do it otherwise, but it works and I'm not going to be judged for it because it's a student job totally unrelated to programming.
The thing about the program is, it's going to be run on multiple different computer with different screen sizes and resolutions (800x600 and up). To make sure it takes as much of the screen as possible without losing any part of the program, I set the layout to null and hard-coded everything using relative values.
The program is kiosk-style and I first get the screen size values and go from there (for example, off the top of my head, the left-side menu takes an eighth of the screen, the top bar 2%, etc.). I also use font metrics to make sure the components are sized correctly and that everything gets displayed nicely.
My question is: why is it so frowned upon to make the layout null instead of using the layout managers? (I was told on some forums that this is a horrible way of doing things) I know how the layout manager works and know how to use the different layouts, but for the requirements of this program (multiple different resolutions, custom button shapes and placements, text changing on the components when you change language, etc.), I couldn't see myself using the layout managers to do it all.
How do you more experienced programmers use the layout managers in a situation like this? And what do you do when you want a button to be somewhere specific and other components somewhere else specific that don't really match any of the predefined layouts?
If you layer the layout managers correctly the screen will re-flow to different sizes for you, the idea is to use a single set of layout managers on ALL screen sizes.
If you use null you will have to do each screen size yourself. Not only that but if the app can be windowed you have to support every possible size they might scroll to.
That's kind of difficult to do, but the layout mangers are designed to do just that.
There are some common tricks. BorderLayout is a great layout to start with. Sometimes you might use it at multiple levels--often with just 2 or 3 components in it. That's because it's really good at giving all but one area the minimum required area and giving everything else to the CENTER.
FlowLayout can be useful but it's tricky if your components are different sizes.
I wouldn't try GridBagLayout unless you are planning to write code to feed your layout manager (an excellent solution at that!).
I also wouldn't use GUI builders, they don't know the overall way you want to reflow your layout.
In a nutshell: because all the work that you explain above is done (or at least: should be done) by the layout manager.
More often than not, when a null layout is used, it also implies that all positions and sizes are hardcoded to a single value, so no flexibility at all is given. This means that changes in window size, language, font size, display density or any other related parameter have no effect on the layout and you get the usual ugly effects: empty parts of the window; tiny, unresizable lists; buttons with their labels cut off; ...
It sounds like the work you do should really be done by the Layout Manager. Either find one that does that (my personal suggestion would be MiGLayout, which does a lot and is easy to use) or write your own.
You are practically using a layout - your own, with all your sophisticated calculations of positions.
You can move these logic to a custom layout manager class to pacify the critics.
hmmm trick should be by mixing LayoutMangers and by usage of numbers of nested JPanels that each could have diferrent Layout or not, really depends of number of JComponents, that allows you to create GUI that looks like as layed by using AbsoluteLayout but with same look/output to the GUI for every screen resolutions and ratio (4:3, 16:9, 16:10)