Question

I’m working on a Layout plugin to place all items added to the the parent object in a grid formation. I want to be able to set the column, row, padding values. I push all child objects into an array and I loop these with a for loop. I already tried to use a double for loop to check on wich position the objects need to be placed but that always gave me index out of bounds errors. Currently I’m using this code to set up my grid formation:

    var COLUMNS:int = vars.columns;
    var PADDING:Number = 10;


    for(var i:int = 0; i < childs.length; i++)
    {
        childs[i].x = (i % COLUMNS) * (childs[i].width + PADDING);
        childs[i].y = int(i / COLUMNS) * (childs[i].height + PADDING);
    }

and here is an example of how I’m using this plugin:
NOTE: The Draw objects just return a sprite with the dimensions of 150×150

    var container:Sprite = new Sprite();
    var obj1:Draw = new Draw({x:0 ,y:0 ,width:_width,height:_height, color:Constants.GREEN});
    var obj2:Draw = new Draw({x:0 ,y:0 ,width:_width,height:_height, color:0x2C2C2C});
    var obj3:Draw = new Draw({x:0 ,y:0 ,width:_width,height:_height, color:Constants.BLACK});
    var obj4:Draw = new Draw({x:0 ,y:0 ,width:_width,height:_height, color:Constants.GREEN});
    var obj5:Draw = new Draw({x:0 ,y:0 ,width:_width,height:_height, color:Constants.GREEN});
    var obj6:Draw = new Draw({x:0 ,y:0 ,width:_width,height:_height, color:0x2C2C2C});
    var obj7:Draw = new Draw({x:0 ,y:0 ,width:_width,height:_height, color:Constants.BLACK});
    var obj8:Draw = new Draw({x:0 ,y:0 ,width:_width,height:_height, color:Constants.GREEN});
    var obj9:Draw = new Draw({x:0 ,y:0 ,width:_width,height:_height, color:Constants.GREEN});

    addChild(container);
    container.addChild(obj1);
    container.addChild(obj2);
    container.addChild(obj3);
    container.addChild(obj4);
    container.addChild(obj5);
    container.addChild(obj6);
    container.addChild(obj7);
    container.addChild(obj9);

    Layout.setLayout(new GridLayout(container, {columns:4, rows:10, spacing:2}));

Anyone got any idea on how to create a better grid loop with fixed columns, rows, spacing where all the objects are retrieved by an earlier filled array?

Answer 1

I found how I could make this work!
for the people who are interessed:

1) check before drawing the grid

    var cols:int = vars.columns;
    var rows:int = vars.rows;
    var spacing:int = vars.spacing;


    if((cols * rows) >= childs.length) {
        drawComplexGrid(rows, cols, spacing);
    } else {
        var val:int = Math.max(rows, cols);
        drawComplexGrid(val,(childs.length/val), spacing);
    }

2) Actually drawing the grid and checking if the array is empty or not (array childs is already filled with a few “Draw” objects

private function drawComplexGrid(rows:int, cols:int, spacing:int):void
{
    for (var py:int = 0; py <rows; py++)
    {
        for (var px:int = 0; px <cols; px++)
        {
            if(childs.length > 0)
            {
                var child:* = childs.shift();

                child.x = (child.width + spacing) * px;
                child.y = (child.height + spacing) * py;

            } else {
                break;
            }

        }
    }
}