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<meta name="description" content="The JGoodies Forms helps you layout and implement elegant Panel quickly and consistently.">
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<h1>:: Tutorial :: Basics ::</h1>
This page introduces the basic FormLayout features as demonstrated
by the basic tutorial examples. To see details and examples
click on the related topic of the Developer's Reference
in the side bar.
<p>
<b>It is recommended to have the JGoodies Forms Demo open on your screen!</b>
<h2>Alignments</h2>
Forms allows to align component horizontally to the <i>left, center, right</i>
and vertically to the <i>top, center, bottom</i>.
And it can <i>fill</i> the space available in the cell or cells.
<h2>Basic Sizes</h2>
Forms provides a rich set of sizes: <tt>75px</tt> is a <i>constant size</i>
of 75 pixels, <tt>pref</tt> is a <i>component size</i>. The latter describes
that a column or row gets the maximum of the preferred sizes of
all components in that column or row. For columns it measures the
width aspect of the size, rows measure the height.
<h2>Growing</h2>
If the container is larger than the preferred container size
you have extra space. You can specify how to distribute this extra space:
let a single column or row grow, or multipe columns/rows.
In the latter case you can define resize <i>weights</i> to give different columns/rows
different portions of the extra space.
<h2>Span</h2>
A component can span a single or multiple columns and rows.
You specify its display area by a <tt>CellConstraints</tt> object
that accepts a column width and row height. By default the
column and row span is 1, so the a component is in a single cell.
<p>
<b>Note:</b> components that span multiple columns or rows
do not affect the size of these columns/rows. However, they may
expand the container, see also the <a href="../faq.html#L.5">FAQ</a>.
<h2>Grouping</h2>
An essential layout feature for symmetric, and more generally, balanced
design is to give columns and rows the same width/height.
Forms allows to specify groups of columns and rows that shall
get the same size. You can set a 2-dimensional array of
column and row indices that describes a set of such groups.
<h2>Units</h2>
The constant sizes used with the Forms accept different units:
<i>Pixel, Points, Millimeter, Centimeter, Inches, Dialog Units</i>.
For the final layout all units (except Pixels) must be mapped to pixels.
Points, Millimeters, Centimeters and Inches honor the screen
resolution; Dialog Units scale with the font, font size too.
Generally you should avoid Pixel sizes, because they do not
retain proportions if the resolution or dialog font changes.
Most constant sizes use Dialog Units; they help you
retain proportions for a wide range of application environments.
This is especially important in multi-platform applications.
The other resolution-independent sizes are useful only
if you want to specify a size that shall grow and shrink
with the resolution but not the font size.
<h2>Cell Alignments</h2>
Forms applies column and row alignments to all contained cells
to reduce the amount of code. For example, you can specify that
all labels in a column shall be right-aligned with a single commmand.
In addition it uses default alignments
for columns and rows that are used if you do not specify an alignment
explicitly. The column default is <i>fill</i>, row default is <i>center</i>.
<h2>Component Sizes</h2>
An essential layout manager feature is to adjust column and row sizes
to the component minimum and preferred widths and heights.
Forms provides three ways to describe that a column or row shall
reflect these component sizes.
A <i>Min</i> column size specifies that the column width will
be the maximum of all minimum width of the components in that column.
The same applies to rows, just with a different orientation,
and to <i>Pref</i> with the preferred width/height.
The <i>Default</i> size is like <i>Pref</i> but shrinks down to
<i>Min</i> if the container space is scarce.
<h2>Bounded Sizes</h2>
Bounded sizes allow to specify a lower and/or upper bound for a size.
This can be used to make layouts 'stable' over different panels.
For example if you have a set of tabs and label columns in all tabs,
you can specify that all label columns shall have a minimum width
of 50dlu. If you switch the tabs, the panels don't 'jump' back and
forth but seem to be located at the same place.
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