Question

In my application, there are 4 panels. And i need to insert them into the main panel, which uses BorderLayout. The 4 panels are…

1. A thin Image strip.
2. 4 buttons just below above
3. A TextField covering the complete page.
4. An about at end.

This is my code…

    add(imageLabel, BorderLayout.NORTH);
    add(buttonPanel,BorderLayout.PAGE_START);
    add(logScrollPane, BorderLayout.CENTER);
    add(about, BorderLayout.PAGE_END);

When I do this, the buttonPanel disappears. How can I achieve what I need?

Answer 1

I usually try to keep a maximum of 3 components in any BorderLayout, so I would do it like this…

JPanel outerPanel = new JPanel(new BorderLayout());
JPanel innerPanel= new JPanel(new BorderLayout());

innerPanel.add(buttonPanel,BorderLayout.NORTH);
innerPanel.add(logScrollPane, BorderLayout.CENTER);
innerPanel.add(about, BorderLayout.SOUTH);

outerPanel.add(imageLabel, BorderLayout.NORTH);
outerPanel.add(innerPanel,BorderLayout.CENTER);

As long as you keep the ‘maximum-stretched’ component in the CENTER (in this case, your logScrollPane) then it’ll always work. If you want to use the panel, such as setting it on a JFrame, just use add(outerPanel).

Don’t be afraid of BorderLayout – the ability of this layout to auto-expand the CENTER component to fill the available space make it a very powerful and very important LayoutManager!