by P38 » Wed Feb 09, 2011 2:56 pm
I also have been trying to use FormLayout and had similar problems.
I tried the beta version recommended, and it did not fix things.
Questions:
Is FormLayout the only layout that can do the following? We have a Composite with three widgets in a single row. The middle widget should grow with the composite's width. The rightmost widget should stay the same size and be aligned to the right edge.
Questions about using WindowBuilder (WB) with FormLayout :
1. What if you set, for example, Right Alignment on a control and later decide you don't want right alignment? How do you undo that? Selecting it in the Properties window and pressing Delete causes WB to crash.
2. Is WB seriously supposed to do everything visually or is it realistic to expect that many things have to be fixed through manual editing of the code?
3. WB seems to decide what to anchor things to and it makes this choice impossible to change (without manually editing code). The control you are aligned to is shown in the properties window. This seems to lead to situations in which controls within a container are all linked in a highly convoluted way. Why not just do what .Net does with their Anchor feature? Controls can be anchored top, bottom, left and/or right to their parent container. This is simple, yet very effective.
4. WB shows what control a widget is aligned to in the Properties Window. Unfortunately, it does not let us change this to correct things. If you don't like the idea expressed in the preceding point, then why not give us a combobox or droplist which lets us choose what to anchor things to.
5. When placing a component and setting its size, is there some trick to getting this to work? Our experience has been that when you try to set its size, WB spontaneously changes the size after you release the mouse. To get things sized correctly, we've found that you have to do it in many steps, sneaking up on WB or it will up and change the size in an undesireable way including putting some of the control outside of the parent container.
6. We have experienced cases using FormLayout where we would add a control and the other controls, which we painstakingly had gotten into about the right positions, would all change size and position radically. Is there a reason for this, or is this a bug?