Custom Components
The Components
TwoColumnGridPane
GridPane is probably the second most over-used and abused of the JavaFX layout classes. Beginners seem to love the idea shoving everything into a row/column format and it somehow satifies their need for order - I guess. But GridPane can become really tedious to use, everything has to be put into an exact row and column, it’s difficult to insert a row in the middle of a GridPane, and the row and column constraints can be difficult to work with. Most of the time, you can get better, simpler results by nesting HBox and VBox regions. But if you really do want things to line up exactly into columns and rows, then GridPane can be the right layout to use.
One use case that comes up quite often is a situation where you want to have part of the screen laid out with a column of Labels or “prompts” and then a column of TextFields or data display Labels lining up just to the right of them. Two neat columns, the left column right justified and the right column left justified, so that everything lines up nicely down the middle.
And this is TwoColumnGridPane, a custom class that’s really nothing more than a standard GridPane formatted up properly and loaded up with a set of methods to easily allow you to add [prompt, data] pairs into the GridPane without have to worry about counting rows.
InputActionWidget
There’s lots of occasions when you need the combination of a Label, a TextField and a Button to perform some function in a screen.