<hint>not really, alas</hint>

Hehe.. I see...

That's actually not a simple domain at all.. it starts out simple, but there are lots of corner cases. Didn't ControlsFX cover that?

How can you make something inside an HBox take up all the vertical space in the HBox? Anybody knows? If I can figure that out, I can solve this textarea thing quite easily..

they do, I read the example and the code 4 times and got a headache each time......

@edvin I managed to change the app.xml content before embedding. just had to inject a task with dependsOn between generateApplicationManifest and embedApplicationManifest reading the app.xml replace string and writing content back 😉

@frosch95 Ah, perfect! Nice work! But as you saw, it's just too hard. We need specialized support for this for sure.

@ron Doesn't it work good?

not really

its very convoluted

Hmm... After the guide is done.. we can make one then!

I wrote one ages ago for a client, where the list was constantly refreshed through a call back to the backend, making it possible to show parts of a list from a table that was thousands of records

never was allowed to take the code back to os though ☹️

It's an interesting challenge.

well it was the dutch irs 😉

Pretty cool 🙂

we wrote some crazy shit there, but nothing was allowed to leave the building, so I never gave it back to apache

That's how it is.. but I bet we can make a reimplementation even nicer based on your experience 🙂 Gotta run now, later!

@edvin. i'm sure you know this, but if you put 4 TextAreas in a VBox, they'll take up all the available space if set to resize SOMETIMES

@edvin maybe you can use @ron suggestion and define the Field as either a VBox or a HBox, depending on a builder setting. Use delegation instead of inheritance

FormTest.kt looks like a good starting point to experiment with resizing

GridPane will work too. For the FormTest.kt example, add a 1x4 GridPane with Label and TextArea alternating. The constraints for the Label are grow=NEVER and those of the TextArea are grow=SOMETIMES. The two TextAreas divide up the extra vertical. All components will stretch out horizontally.

@edvin For the HBox taking up all the vertical space...it's a cheap trick but you could wrap it in a VBox

@carlw: thanks for this, I will play with it and see what yields the best result :)

i'll play around with a few Form/Fieldset/Field classes too...investigating a form(VERTICAL) API based on a delegated VBox or HBox or a GridPane that is 1xN for each label/text pair or 2XN with a label in the first col and a pair in the second (i know this will get into row spans and >2 cols)

Surgery went fine :)

Good now take your time to get better

I am @ron - with my computer 🙂

About the Form -> Field. I think the input container should be determinate, it would be confusing for users if it changed, and it might yield type cast exceptions at runtime. I will try to improve the input container layout first.

Have you considered GridPane as a superclass for Form? The Fieldset titles would be added as single-item rows. Each Field would be either two rows -- Label and input control -- or a row/col pair.