SwingBuilder Series: Layouts - BorderLayout

SwingBuilder is the most important class for creating views in Groovy and Griffon, so I think it's worth to learn it deeply. In this entry I'm using the most well known layout in Java desktop development: java.awt.BorderLayout.

To test all your SwingBuilder views SwingPad is a really nice tool for prototyping. SwingPad is bundled with Griffon distributions as a sample app.

BorderLayout can arrange components in 5 different areas: NORTH,SOUTH,EAST,WEST and CENTER.

In this particular case I'm applying this layout to a given panel:

import java.awt.BorderLayout as BL
import java.awt.Dimension

panel(preferredSize:new Dimension(500,200)){
      borderLayout()
   /* -- NORTH --- */
      textField(id:'title',constraints:BL.NORTH)
   /* -- CENTER --- */
      scrollPane(constraints:BL.CENTER){
          table(id:'messages'){
             tableModel(){
                 propertyColumn(header:'language',propertyName:'language')
                 propertyColumn(header:'text',propertyName:'text')
             }
          }
      }
  /* -- SOUTH --- */
      button(
        id:'executeButton',
        constraints:BL.SOUTH,
      )   
}

And this is how it looks:

In order to apply a BorderLayout to a given container is to declare the node borderLayout() before adding component nodes.

Finally, component arrangement should be made through the constraints property in each of the added components

 button(
id:'executeButton',
constraints:BL.SOUTH,
)