[news.eclipse.platform.swt] Re: Implementing a proper layout for wizard

[Eric Rizzo <eclipse-news@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Note: I'm copying this thread to the SWT newsgroup.

Whenever I have trouble with string-oriented widgets (Text and Label) 
wanting to stretch their containers, I've found two approaches that 
usually help:

A) If using a GridLayout, I set the widget's GridData to expand 
horizontally *and* its width hint to 1. This forces its "preferred" size 
to be just 1 pixel (which prevents it from stretching the container) and 
yet forces it to fill available space.

B) Switch to a different layout that will properly use the SWT.WRAP 
style, such as TableWrapLayout, FillLayout, etc. It is always good to 
remember that there are other worlds than just GridLayout ;-)

Hope this helps,
Eric


Karsten Stöckmann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> currently, I am experimenting with the layout of some wizard pages I've
> created for an application I am currently working on.
>
> As to find some kind of "best practise", I've come across the following:
>
> I've got a wizard page containing an explanatory text (Label) that
> occupies several lines. In the past, I've solved this by inserting
> "hard" line breaks (\n) into the string. However, this is not a very
> elegant approach, as of course this label won't adapt its size when the
> wizard dialog is resized.
>
> A better solution would be to use a Label that has the SWT.WRAP style
> set, and to set a GridData that grabs the available space and fills its
> cell as to make the Label automatically adapt its size to the dialog.
> This works fine on Linux-Gtk; however, on win32 it does not - the label
> stretches the entire dialog.
>
> So, I've got two questions concerning this:
>
> 1. What is the difference in the described behaviour based on?
> Obviously, gtk takes another "reference" for laying out the dialog and
> determining its width than win32 does.
>
> 2. What would be a proper solution to this? Setting a width hint? If so,
> where? Wizard dialog, wizard page, label?
>
> (Actually, the same applies to PreferencePages; see
> https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=107064)
>
> Best wishes,
> Karsten