Belongs to following categories: Extension, ULC5.2,
Purpose
This extension provides developers with ULC's complement to Clearthought's well-known TableLayout. The ULCTableLayoutPane is easy to use but still provides maximum flexibility for complex GUIs. Its API is very close to the TableLayout and makes migration from Swing GUIs using the TableLayout very simple.
The TableLayout is considered to be even more powerful than the GridBagLayout, as can be read in an
Article from the Swing Connection.
Resources
How to use
We first have to define the dimension of our spreadsheet-like grid. We can define each cell's width and height as an absolute width, as a relative width, or as a special width (preferred, minimum, and fill).
There are several ways how we can add components to the
ULCTableLayoutPane and specify their layout constraints. We can add a component and specify its constraints using a
TableLayoutConstraints object or a
String object. As an alternative, we can add the component and specify its constraints in two separate steps. Note that we can also modify the constraints for a component that is already uploaded and visible. In the example below, we define a grid of 3 columns by 2 rows and add 2 components to the first row and 1 component to the second row which spans 3 columns.
...
ULCTableLayoutPane pane = new ULCTableLayoutPane();
pane.setColumns(new double[]{50, TableLayoutConstraints.FILL, .3});
pane.setRows(new double[]{TableLayoutConstraints.PREFERRED, TableLayoutConstraints.FILL});
TableLayoutConstraints constraints = new TableLayoutConstraints();
ULCButton button = new ULCButton("1");
constraints.fCol1 = 0;
constraints.fRow1 = 0;
constraints.fCol2 = 0;
constraints.fRow2 = 0;
constraints.fhAlign = TableLayoutConstraints.FULL;
constraints.fvAlign = TableLayoutConstraints.TOP;
pane.setConstraints(button, constraints);
pane.add(button);
button = new ULCButton("2");
constraints.fCol1 = 2;
constraints.fRow1 = 0;
constraints.fCol2 = 2;
constraints.fRow2 = 0;
constraints.fhAlign = TableLayoutConstraints.FULL;
constraints.fvAlign = TableLayoutConstraints.BOTTOM;
pane.add(button, constraints);
button = new ULCButton("3");
pane.add(button, "0 1 2 1 FULL FULL");
ulcFrame.add(pane);
...Using the
ULCXmlConstraintBuilder class, we can also read the layout definition from an XML file (thanks to
claus).
How it is implemented
The
UITableLayoutPane class serves as a proxy to the
ULCTableLayoutPane class. It uses Clearthought's
TableLayout to arrange the components in a
JPanel. The client-side and server-side class inherit from
UIAbstractLayoutPane and
ULCAbstractLayoutPane respectively.
Compatibility
The described functionality has been developed and tested using JDK 1.3.1_10 and ULC 5.2.
Author
etienne
