Hi Martin, On 30.07.2014 17:39, Martin Sladecek wrote:
I assume you don't change "child1" Nodes, so it should work.
I may add/insert such nodes but in that case I take the easy route and simply rebuild the complete hbox.
Yeah, one problem with layouts is when you want to do some layout that is almost the same as some predefined layout, but you need to tweak it somehow. Maybe in the future we could add some abstraction and extract some (parts of) the algorithms we use in our layout containers so they can be reused in custom layouts.
Right. I noticed some package private methods used internally by vbox etc. This prevents me from making a copy of vbox which I can tweak (often times removing many properties and lots of code not applicable to that usecase). I suppose they could also be useful for other layouts occasionally.
I figured if I would use translateX for the tweak I should be fine. For the width I might be able to use scaleX but that does not feel right.
If you reuse some predefined layout, you'll probably end up with some hacky code since you'll usually mess up with the inputs for the layout. The rule of thumb is to use some more complex (GridPane) or free form (AnchorPane) layout instead of trying to slightly tweak some simple layout. In your case, wouldn't GridPane do the job? Basically, you have a row of text nodes and you need a second row where a single rectangle is in the same column as currently selected (?) text node. The size of the rectangle can be set to fillWidth the column, so GridPane will do all the work for you.
AnchorPane might be applicable for this particular thing. The challenge here is then to figure out the heights of elements so that I can stack them to get a result similar to the vbox. For example, if I anchor the hbox to the top of the AnchorPane and I want to have my moving rectangle right below it I have to set static AnchorPane properties on that rectangle and have to know the height of the hbox. Again I need to position one element based on the default layouting of another. And if I am not mistaken it could be difficult to animate those static properties.
I try to avoid GridPane because inserting and removing stuff means to manually shift all subsequent indexes which is a bit tedious. Also, if I want to animate an element moving from one cell to another it seems to get in the way - or at least it does not offer any benefit over the current vbox/hbox approach.
Werner
