Question

I have a small problem when using JScrollPane in my Java application.

I have a JScrollPane containing a JPanel.
This JPanel is dynamically updated with buttons (vertically ordered) that can be of any width.
The JPanel automatically adjusts its width to the largest JButton component inside.

Now when the vertical scrollbar appears, it takes away some space on the right side of my JPanel, which causes the largest buttons not to appear completely. I don’t want to use a horizontal scrollbar in addition to display the whole button.

Is there a way to resize my JPanel when a scrollbar appears, so it appears nicely next to my buttons? Or is there any other way to have the scrollbar appear next to my JPanel?

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: Here is a demo of my problem. When you resize the window to a smaller height, a little part of the buttons on the right side gets covered.

import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import java.awt.EventQueue;

import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JLabel;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.JScrollPane;
import java.awt.GridLayout;

/**
 * @author Dylan Kiss
 */

public class Demo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                try {
                    JFrame myFrame = new JFrame("Demo");
                    JPanel sideBar = new JPanel();
                    JPanel centerPanel = new JPanel();
                    centerPanel.add(new JLabel("This is the center panel."));

                    JPanel buttonContainer = new JPanel();
                    JButton myButton = null;

                    for (int i = 0; i < 20; i++) {
                        buttonContainer.setLayout(new GridLayout(20, 1, 0, 0));
                        myButton = new JButton("This is my button nr. " + i);
                        buttonContainer.add(myButton);
                    }

                    sideBar.setLayout(new BorderLayout(0, 0));

                    JScrollPane scrollPane = new JScrollPane(buttonContainer);

                    sideBar.add(scrollPane);

                    myFrame.getContentPane().add(sideBar, BorderLayout.WEST);
                    myFrame.getContentPane().add(centerPanel, BorderLayout.CENTER);

                    myFrame.setLocationByPlatform(true);
                    myFrame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
                    myFrame.pack();
                    myFrame.setVisible(true);
                } catch (Exception e) {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
            }
        });
    }
}

Answer 1

Here is a simple, not pretty, solution:

scrollPane.setVerticalScrollBarPolicy(JScrollPane.VERTICAL_SCROLLBAR_ALWAYS);

EDIT:
I thought that might not do the job in your case. Here is a better solution although it has quite a lot of boilerplate:

private class ButtonContainerHost extends JPanel implements Scrollable {
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

    private final JPanel buttonContainer;

    public ButtonContainerHost(JPanel buttonContainer) {
        super(new BorderLayout());
        this.buttonContainer = buttonContainer;
        add(buttonContainer);
    }

    @Override
    public Dimension getPreferredScrollableViewportSize() {
        Dimension preferredSize = buttonContainer.getPreferredSize();
        if (getParent() instanceof JViewport) {
            preferredSize.width += ((JScrollPane) getParent().getParent()).getVerticalScrollBar()
                    .getPreferredSize().width;
        }
        return preferredSize;
    }

    @Override
    public int getScrollableBlockIncrement(Rectangle visibleRect, int orientation, int direction) {
        return orientation == SwingConstants.HORIZONTAL ? Math.max(visibleRect.width * 9 / 10, 1)
                : Math.max(visibleRect.height * 9 / 10, 1);
    }

    @Override
    public boolean getScrollableTracksViewportHeight() {
        if (getParent() instanceof JViewport) {
            JViewport viewport = (JViewport) getParent();
            return getPreferredSize().height < viewport.getHeight();
        }
        return false;
    }

    @Override
    public boolean getScrollableTracksViewportWidth() {
        return true;
    }

    @Override
    public int getScrollableUnitIncrement(Rectangle visibleRect, int orientation, int direction) {
        return orientation == SwingConstants.HORIZONTAL ? Math.max(visibleRect.width / 10, 1)
                : Math.max(visibleRect.height / 10, 1);
    }
}

It implements Scrollable to get full control of scrolling, does a fancy trick with tracking the viewport height to ensure the buttons expand when the space is available and adds on the width of the vertical scroll bar to the preferred width at all times. It could expand when the vertical scroll bar is visible but that looks bad anyway. Use it like this:

scrollPane = new JScrollPane(new ButtonContainerHost(buttonContainer));

It looks to me like this workaround is required because of a possible bug in javax.swing.ScrollPaneLayout:

if (canScroll && (viewSize.height > extentSize.height)) {
    prefWidth += vsb.getPreferredSize().width;
}

Here extentSize is set to the preferred size of the viewport and viewSize is set to viewport.getViewSize(). This does not seem correct, AFAIK the size of the view inside the viewport should always equal the preferred size. It seems to me that the view size should be compared to the actual size of the viewport rather than its preferred size.