Skin layoutChildren: when to get bounds of child nodes?

[Werner Lehmann]

Hi Martin,

On 30.07.2014 17:39, Martin Sladecek wrote:
> I assume you don't change "child1" Nodes, so it should work.

I may add/insert such nodes but in that case I take the easy route and 
simply rebuild the complete hbox.

> Yeah, one problem with layouts is when you want to do some layout that
> is almost the same as some predefined layout, but you need to tweak it
> somehow. Maybe in the future we could add some abstraction and extract
> some (parts of) the algorithms we use in our layout containers so they
> can be reused in custom layouts.

Right. I noticed some package private methods used internally by vbox 
etc. This prevents me from making a copy of vbox which I can tweak 
(often times removing many properties and lots of code not applicable to 
that usecase). I suppose they could also be useful for other layouts 
occasionally.

I figured if I would use translateX for the tweak I should be fine. For 
the width I might be able to use scaleX but that does not feel right.

> If you reuse some predefined layout, you'll probably end up with some
> hacky code since you'll usually mess up with the inputs for the layout.
> The rule of thumb is to use some more complex (GridPane) or free form
> (AnchorPane) layout instead of trying to slightly tweak some simple layout.
> In your case, wouldn't GridPane do the job? Basically, you have a row of
> text nodes and you need a second row where a single rectangle is in the
> same column as currently selected (?) text node. The size of the
> rectangle can be set to fillWidth the column, so GridPane will do all
> the work for you.

AnchorPane might be applicable for this particular thing. The challenge 
here is then to figure out the heights of elements so that I can stack 
them to get a result similar to the vbox. For example, if I anchor the 
hbox to the top of the AnchorPane and I want to have my moving rectangle 
right below it I have to set static AnchorPane properties on that 
rectangle and have to know the height of the hbox. Again I need to 
position one element based on the default layouting of another. And if I 
am not mistaken it could be difficult to animate those static properties.

I try to avoid GridPane because inserting and removing stuff means to 
manually shift all subsequent indexes which is a bit tedious. Also, if I 
want to animate an element moving from one cell to another it seems to 
get in the way - or at least it does not offer any benefit over the 
current vbox/hbox approach.

Werner