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Bug 370062

Summary: Adding Support for RelativeLayout
Product: z_Archived Reporter: Alessio Pollero <alessio.pollero>
Component: WindowBuilderAssignee: Project inbox <wb.swing-inbox>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P4 CC: alessio.pollero, clayberg
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
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Description Alessio Pollero CLA 2012-01-29 07:43:22 EST 
Build Identifier: Version: 3.7.1 Build id: M20110909-1335

RelativeLayout ---> http://code.google.com/p/relativelayout/

RelativeLayout is a free layout manager for Java SE 1.5.0 and higher. Rather than relying on grids or nested boxes, RelativeLayout lets you lay out components relative to each other and the window that contains them. This turns out to be a much more intuitive way of going about it, and virtually any interface you can imagine can be easily created this way.

I'm trying to use this good layout manager with windowbuilder but it seems that it is not supported.
I have imported the layout manager into my project then i added the relativeLayout with the standard add component wizard into the Layouts container in the palette, but if i try to use with windowbuilder i can't ...

See the attached screenshot for more details.

Reproducible: Always
Comment 1 Alessio Pollero CLA 2012-01-29 07:45:50 EST 
Created attachment 210240 [details]
Screenshot

As you can see from the image when i drag some components (like a JButton) into a container set with RelativeLayout the component is not rendered and it is not really added in the code ...
Comment 2 Alessio Pollero CLA 2012-01-29 07:48:14 EST 
Created attachment 210241 [details]
Sample Project

A simple sample project where you can see that no code is really written by windowbuilder when a component is added in the designer.

The only generated code is : 

        /**
	 * @wbp.nonvisual location=338,271
	 */
	private final JButton button = new JButton("New button");
Comment 3 Eric Clayberg CLA 2012-01-29 11:34:53 EST 
Since there is no JavaBean spec for automatically including custom layout managers into a UI layout tool, custom design time code must be written in every case. Adding support for custom layouts requires a lot of work, but WB provides dozens of examples implementing all of the standard Java layout managers as well as a couple of popular 3rd party layout managers. 

The WB committer team has no plans to add support for this layout, but we would be happy to review any community submitted patches that add the needed support. Any such support should be located in its own separate plugin (for example, see the support for MiGLayout or JGoodies FormLayout).
Comment 4 Alessio Pollero CLA 2012-01-29 11:49:30 EST 
Ok, so if i want to write the integration with this LayoutManagers, is there any kind of documentation to look ?

Where can i find the examples you mentioned ?
Comment 5 Eric Clayberg CLA 2012-01-30 11:00:50 EST 
You should review the New Components Tutorial and Designer Customization API in the WB docs, and look at the org.eclipse.wb.swing.MigLayout, org.eclipse.wb.swing.FormLayout and org.eclipse.wb.swing projects in the WB source.