'Overlayed' Panel/ Docked Panel.

[CoilFyzx]

Hello good day.

I have an idea for my program. I have a Table in my display. I want to add a Component to - let's say - the right of my screen. When I click this component it should display to me buttons and other components that I have added to it. I want this component is activiated I want it to display from one side of my Frame as a layer over the Table that I have in my display; much like a docked panel or overlay panel.

I would love to know how I could accomplish this please? Are there any components that would facilitate this?

My current GUI setup is this.

My JFrame has a JScrollPane with a JTabbedPane as it's viewport view. On one of the tabbed pane's JPanel's there is THAT TABLE I mentioned added to it within a JScrollPane.

[mKorbel]

there are four ways

• OverLayout or JLayeredPane

• GlassPane

• JLayer (required Java7 based on JXLayer - Java6)

• Java Accordion

_____________________________________________

• note don't to use JViewport for this job without own custom RepaintManager

[JamesCherrill]

+1 for JLayeredPane - it's what it was designed for

[CoilFyzx]

Thank you very much. So do I add the layered pane to the tabbed Pane?

[JamesCherrill]

Other way round. You add the layered pane to your JFrame, then add everything to the layered pane so you can overlap things as required.

[CoilFyzx]

Okay. Here's another question please:

Searching forums it seems that I have to treat the adding of components to the layered pane as if I were creating my own layout...setLocattion...setBounds...
this is me hardcoding locations. Isn't this bad practice? How do I seamlessly take care of resizing of my frame using layered pane please?

[CoilFyzx]

Let me be more specific then, whenever I use absolute positioning resizing my JFrame leaves me with some out of place components.

I have added my JLayeredPane to a scroll pane. How do I get my scrollpane to allow scrolling when the JFrame shrinks to a particular dimension please?

[JamesCherrill]

Although a layered pane has no layout manager by default, you can still assign a layout manager to the layered pane.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/components/layeredpane.html#layout

[mKorbel]

whenever I use absolute positioning resizing my JFrame leaves me with some out of place components.

• add ComponentListener to JFrame,

• must be delayed by Swing Timer (local variable) with small delay (450-600ms) because this listener firing one event per one pixel, to avoiding (useless) bunch of repainting at runtime

• call Timer.restart() if resize continued,

• otherwise Swing Action or ActionListener will fired

• resize of layer should be wrapped into invokeLater (moving this event to the end of EDT queue)

[CoilFyzx]

Thank you all. I decided that I could put my JLayeredPane in a ScrollPane. This worked for me.

I set the size of the layered pane and it's preferred size as well as the size of the scroll pane. Thank you very much for your help. I hope I didn't annoy anyone...(I keep getting this feeling that I am. :s)

[JamesCherrill]

Annoying? Absolutely not! Sensible questions, and good use made of the answers. Ideal.
Mark solved?