Tip: In GWT, VerticalPanel could be replaced with FlowPanel

I’ve been fighting with a lot of layout issues over the last few hours that are caused by differences between the way IE and Firefox handle table widths. IE seems to expand tables whether I like it or not, which is a pain. VerticalPanel uses a table to line elements up vertically.

I’ve started trying FlowPanel as an alternative; FlowPanel inserts elements without any wrapping (they just go into the parent element), which means that if any element is a block element, they’ll all be put into blocks and stacked vertically, just like VerticalPanel but without the tables.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 4:45 pm and is filed under GWT, html. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Tip: In GWT, VerticalPanel could be replaced with FlowPanel”

Renato Says:
November 12, 2007 at 12:06 pm | Reply
Ok! But what if I want a flow layout behaviour. Adding itens to panel and organize them horizontally and at the end of a line go vertically?
dobes Says:
November 12, 2007 at 3:38 pm | Reply
Well, any HTML or Label object you insert into the FlowPanel will layout into a flow arrangement, I believe. Just the boxes that automatically expand to fill the box will be stacked vertically.
Vitaly Says:
January 24, 2008 at 6:28 am | Reply
>Just the boxes that automatically expand to fill the box will be stacked vertically.
That’s exactly the situation I am having: scrollpanels (boxes) that I want to flow horizontally, like text. But no luck, they just stuck one under the other.
dobes Says:
January 24, 2008 at 11:22 am | Reply
If you mark all the scroll-panels with css attribute “float:left” you’ll get something like what you want. You’ll probably want to wrap each row in another div with css attributes “float:left;clear:right” so that you don’t get stuff from later in the document being placed to the right of your row.

Disclaimer: I’m more of a CSS+XHTML layout n00b than a pro … googling might give a much better solution.
dobes Says:
January 24, 2008 at 11:49 am | Reply
Ah apparently you solved this and posted the solution in your own blog … http://vitaly.ediew.com/?p=14

display:inline is good, too!
Uncle Ben Says:
May 14, 2008 at 10:28 pm | Reply
It Works…Thanks!
Sudhir Jonathan Says:
May 6, 2009 at 9:07 am | Reply
Both vertical and horizontal panel can just flow panel instead… see http://blog.sudhirj.com/2009/05/vertical-and-horizontal-flow-panels-in.html

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