Smart GWT layout problems

[Olivercomputing]

I've been testing GWT Designer with Smart GWT and encountering a number of issues. Unfortunately it's difficult to pin down exactly when they happen and what causes them.

However I think I've pinned down at least one particular problem. I am using a GUI design pattern that involves nesting H/VLayouts hierarchically within other H/VLayouts.

I've found that manually changing the GUI-specified drag-resizing of these layouts to a percentage (so that, e.g., two widgets in an HLayout can take up 33%/67% of the total width) sometimes results in no apparent change in the design layout. Looking at the generated code, I noticed that the, e.g., layout.setSize("25%", "100%"), is occurring far downstream of the object ('layout' in this example) creation. Manually moving this to right after object creation fixes the problem. So this appears to be a case where it is important to do certain operations in a specific order.

A related issue is that it would be extremely useful to be able to specify widths/heights in terms of percentages and '*' (remainder) rather than fixed pixel sizes, since these are logical and permissible values for layouts/widget dimensions.

I understand that this process of interpreting the code/generating the code between the editor and the visual designer must be devilishly difficult, but this appears to be a significant problem.

[Eric Clayberg]

The problem you are seeing appears to be a bug in SmartGWT which we have reported to the SmartGWT author.

We have reviewed the JavaDoc for setHeight() and don't see any mention that it should be invoked first (before for example setDisabled(true)).

We can certainly work around this if we have to be tweaking the code generation to generate the setWidth()/setHeight()/setSize() methods first, but it would be better if the bug we simply fixed in SmartGWT itself.

[sjivan]

fyi this is resolved in Smart GWT 2.2

[Eric Clayberg]

fyi this is resolved in Smart GWT 2.2

Very good! Note that SmartGWT 2.2 is the only version that we support in the current GWT Designer version.