🚀 go-pugleaf

Peter:

There are a few ways to do this, most involve nested panels with
different layouts.  Assuming it's a Frame (from the menu bar), the
Frame would have a BorderLayout with a MainPanel in it's center and
the statusbar to the South.  I would set the MainPanel layout to XY
(temporarily) and add in a panel for the 6 buttons, a panel for the
hide show button and stick in the TextArea to the right.

The 6 button panel can be done easily with GridLayout, but exactly
would require GridBag (it's a question of the extra space at the top
and bottom of the set of buttons).  You could use a ShapeControl to
get your horizontal line, or just use BevelPanels and let the border
do it for you.

The Hide/Show button panel would be left alone (if the separator line
goes on the 6 button panel) as FlowLayout would do what you describe
and that's the default layout for a panel.

Size the text area to use the remaining space.

Switch the MainPanel to GridBagLayout.  Don't grimace <g>.  Tweak the
constraints for the panels until you get the layout you want.  Once
those are set, work on the children of those panels.

-Rich

Peter Steele wrote:
> 
> I'm having some difficulty in try to reproduce the UI behavior of a program
> I've written in C++ Builder. The main form looks basically like this:
> 
> +------------------------------------------------------------+
> | File Edit Help                                             |
> |------------------------------------------------------------|
> |                        |                                   |
> |  /------\    /------\  |  Text area                        |
> |  |Button|    |Button|  |  This should grow to east and     |
> |  \------/    \------/  |  south as window is resized. Its  |
> |                        |  left edge is anchored at its     |
> |  /------\    /------\  |  designed position. If window is  |
> |  |Button|    |Button|  |  resized to be narrower than the  |
> |  \------/    \------/  |  text area's left edge, the text  |
> |                        |  area should be clipped, as well  |
> |  /------\    /------\  |  as any buttons in the left hand  |
> |  |Button|    |Button|  |  area of the main form.           |
> |  \------/    \------/  |                                   |
> |                        |  If the Hide/Show button is       |
> |------------------------|  pressed, the text area is        |
> |                        |  hidden and resizing the window   |
> |  (that's a horizontal  |  simply extends grey form back-   |
> |   line above)          |  ground. The status bar of course |
> |                        |  is always anchored to the bottom |
> |      /---------\       |  and if the window is too small   |
> |      |Hide/Show|       |  to fit in the buttons they are   |
> |      \---------/       |  clipped.                         |
> |                        |                                   |
> |------------------------------------------------------------|
> | Status bar                                                 |
> +------------------------------------------------------------+
> 
> This was trivial to set up in C++ Builder but I've been unable to come up
> with a way to duplicate this behavior in Java. If anyone can offer some
> advice, it would be appreciated.

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Rich Wilkman
Senior Quality Assurance Engineer
Borland JBuilder Team

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