When Visual Java starts, a control panel appears in the Java WorkShop browser and the Layout panel is activated in a separate window.
Visual Java uses a grid system that enables you to place GUI components, such as buttons and text fields, in the cells of a grid. You can nest grids within the cells of other grids using the Gridbag Layout panel.
At any time during the layout process, you can view a close approximation of how the layout will look in your application by switching the Visual Java mode from Layout to Preview. Switch back and forth between Layout and Preview mode using the radio buttons at the bottom of the control panel.
You can create a grid with as many cells as you need by clicking in any cell and pressing the keyboard arrow keys. A row or column of cells is added to the grid in the direction of the arrow key each time you press it.
Delete cells from the grid by selecting them and pressing the Delete key. The row and column containing the selected cell will be deleted. If the row or column contains a component, then the row or column containing the component will not be deleted. To delete a row or column that contains a component, you must first delete the component.
If you want to add a component to more than one cell:
Click here, or on the image above, for information about the palette components.
A shortcut method for opening the Attribute Editor is to
click the right mouse button while the cursor is positioned
in the area between the component and its cell border.
Component attributes vary, depending on the function of the component. Specialized attributes are explained with the description of their associated components in Visual Java Components. General attributes that apply to most of the components are described in Attribute Editor.
You can also use the Cut icon to delete the
component and place it on the clipboard. Click on a cell
and use the Paste icon
to paste the
component into the selected cell.
Controls on the right change component height; controls on the bottom change component width. Each component has a minimum height and width, below which the controls will not let you resize.
If you click on the black lines within the component resize handles, arrow heads appear on the ends of the black line and the component's size is automatically increased to fill the containing cell. The line on the right fills the cell vertically, and the line on the bottom fills the cell horizontally.
The row/column resize controls interact with the component resize controls to enable you to control how the cells and components behave when the window that contains them is resized.
The interaction between the row/column resize controls and the component resize controls provides you with maximum flexibility in controlling resize behavior. We suggest that you create a small grid with a variety of components and experiment with these controls. The use of these controls will be described fully in documentation that will be posted on the Java WorkShop website in the future. Please refer to the Release Notes for the URL of the Java WorkShop Help Updates page.
See also: