Vertical Grow support for VBox Constraints

[gtnarg]

When using controls such as TextArea in a form, the form does not honor vertical growth as configured below:

form {
    fieldset { 
        field {
            textarea {
                vboxConstraints { Priority.ALWAYS }
            }
        }
    }
}

[edvin]

The container for the textarea in the example above is an hbox, that's why the vboxConstraints have no effect. We will look for a way to express this by other means.

[edvin]

By the way, for your example above to have any effect inside a VBox you need to specify the vGrow property:

vboxConstraints {
    vGrow = Priority.ALWAYS
}

[edvin]

I've been thinking more about this. As mentioned, the field builder creates an HBox container and places all the children inside it. What if we introduced a verticalField that creates a VBox? That would place multiple inputs below each other, and also support vgrow. We could reuse the existing field builder and add a orentation to it, but the problem is that the op block would then need to operate on Pane instead of either HBox and VBox, so you would have to do a cast to access fillWidth, fillHeight and other properties of the boxes.

Another approach would be to create a new container called XBox, which has all the properties of HBox and VBox, and lays out its children according to the orientation. With this we could actually keep backwards compatibility. Not sure how hard it would be to do though.

This might be over thinking it, maybe it's better to change the op block to work on Pane instead. I can't see it breaking much (if any) existing code.

[edvin]

I have added orientation as a parameter to each field, so you can now do:

form {
    fieldset { 
        field(orientation = VERTICAL) {
            textarea {
                vgrow = Priority.ALWAYS
            }
        }
    }
}

Is this satisfactory for you?

[gtnarg]

The following only grows the bottom field when the window is resized:

import javafx.geometry.Orientation
import tornadofx.View
import tornadofx.*
import javafx.scene.layout.Priority

class Issue190 : View("My View") {

    override val root = form {
        fieldset("FieldSet") {
            field("Field 1") {
                textarea {
                    prefRowCount = 2
                    mnemonicTarget()
                    vgrow = Priority.ALWAYS
                }
            }

            field("Field 2", Orientation.VERTICAL) {
                textarea {
                    vgrow = Priority.ALWAYS
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

[edvin]

Yes, because you didn't add the Orientation.VERTICAL parameter to the first field, so it's created as an HBox. Does that make sense?

[gtnarg]

Doh! Makes perfect sense. Works great now :)

Thanks Edvin

[edvin]

Great! Thanks for bringing this up :) It made the Form component much more versatile :)