Laying Out Components within a Container

How to Use FlowLayout

Here's an applet that shows a FlowLayout in action.

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Your browser can't run 1.0 Java applets, so here's a picture of the window the program brings up:

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Note: Because the preceding applet runs using Java Plug-in 1.1.1, it is a Swing 1.0.3 version of the applet. To run the Swing 1.1 Beta 3 version of the applet, you can use the JDK Applet Viewer to view Flow.html, specifying swing.jar in the Applet Viewer's class path. For more information about running applets, refer to About Our Examples.

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FlowLayout puts components in a row, sized at their preferred size. If the horizontal space in the container is too small to put all the components in one row, FlowLayout uses multiple rows. Within each row, components are centered (the default), left-aligned, or right-aligned as specified when the FlowLayout is created.

Below is the code that creates the FlowLayout and the components it manages. (Here's the whole program. The program runs either within an applet, with the help of AppletButton, or as an application.)

JPanel contentPane = new JPanel();
contentPane.setLayout(new FlowLayout());
contentpane.setFont(new Font("Helvetica", Font.PLAIN, 14));
   
contentPane.add(new JButton("Button 1"));
contentPane.add(new JButton("2"));
contentPane.add(new JButton("Button 3"));
contentPane.add(new JButton("Long-Named Button 4"));
contentPane.add(new JButton("Button 5"));

setContentPane(contentPane);

The FlowLayout class has three constructors:

public FlowLayout()
public FlowLayout(int alignment)
public FlowLayout(int alignment,
                  int horizontalGap, int verticalGap)

The alignment argument must have the value FlowLayout.LEFT, FlowLayout.CENTER, or FlowLayout.RIGHT. The horizontalGap and verticalGap arguments specify the number of pixels to put between components. If you don't specify a gap value, FlowLayout uses 5 for the default gap value.

Examples that Use FlowLayout

[PENDING]

Laying Out Components within a Container