Question

Is it possible to completely emulate the behavior of a GridLayout with the GridBagLayout manager?

Basically, I have a 8×8 grid in which each cell should have the same width and height. The GridLayout automatically did this. But I want to add another row and column to the grid which size is not the same as the other ones. That row/column should take up all the remaining space that might be left over (because the available size couldn’t be equally distributed into 8 cells). Is that even possible, or do I – again – have to use a different layout manager?

edit

Here is a simple graphic of what I want to achieve, simplified to just 4 cells:

The colored cells are the ones I added to the actual grid (gray) which has cells with the same height and width x. So the grid’s height and width is 4*x. I now want the additional cells to have the necessary width/height (minimumSize) plus the rest of the available width/height from the full size.

If the whole panel’s size is changed, the gray grid cells should again take up as much as space as possible.

Answer 1

After trying many different things with the built-in layout managers, I decided to create a custom layout manager for this problem as well. I didn’t do it yet, as I didn’t have the time to continue with this project, but when I have it done, I’ll make sure to post the layout manager code here, so that anyone interested in a similar solution can use it.

edit

didxga reminded me in the comments that I wanted to post my solution. However, after digging out the project from back then and looking at it, I actually cannot post my solution because it turns out that I never got to creating it!

It was a uni project that finished official mid September 2010. We actually wanted to continue working on it afterwards, which is probably why I said that I would post it (as that was one thing I wanted to improve), but we never really got around doing it – sadly. Instead I simply left out those extra column and row (which was meant as a label for the rows/columns btw).

So yeah, I’m terribly sorry that I cannot post a layout that does what I initially wanted… 🙁 Maybe if there are enough requesting such a layout, I would create it, but as of now, I’m not really willing to dive into Java layouting again 😉