Question

Give that I have written a JPanel with many different components on it, is there a way to apply an overall “dilate” ability on the panel so that everything in it stretches proportionally when I resize my window?

That is, if I manually resize my window to be 1/4 the size, everything in the panel should also shrink by 1/4 so the new panel is just a dilation of the first. Given that I have not designed the individual components inside to do this (there are many) is there any easy way to make the panel behave this way?

UPDATE: In order to be more clear on the solution I need, I will describe the panel contents:

The panel is a “game” of sorts, with a single null-layout and dozens of ImageIcons flying around the screen at any time. The ImageIcons are preloaded PNG files, which already have a permanent size. Of course, I could manually resize each ImageIcon and reposition them relative to window size, but that would involve recoding many components.

There are no buttons or text to worry about, so what I’m really looking for is some kind of “postprocessed” resize where the panel simply shrinks whatever’s rendered by some porportion (think of resizing an image in Photoshop).

Answer 1

One option is of course to give up swing all together and use some 3rd party widget component library which draws itself using any Graphics. Then you can either draw the widgets on the image and resize the image, or, better yet, apply a transform to the graphics object you pass to the library.

If you do want to stick with swing there is the SwingUtilities.paintComponent method, which you could use to paint the Panel onto a BufferedImage which you could then resize. (I’ve used this myself to do some nice transitions between “views” in a game.)

The problem is of course that you somehow need to translate the user input accordingly. I have no solution for this right now, but the above perhaps helps you in some way.