Lava - The Java GUI Builder

Using Lava to edit components

Once you have drawn some components on the form, you may wish to edit their properties. This is done by selecting the component you wich to edit, right clicking on it and selecting "Edit Component" from the popup menu. This will bring up an edit window for that component :

New Component Dialog

In this case we are editing a button. There are, in general, four tabs in the edit window that apply to all components. These are :

  1. Alignment. These attributes are concerned with how the component is alligned by your chosen layout manager. Options include how the component will fill its grid placing and the size of its insets.
  2. Size. If you don't want to control a components size from the grid you can set the size via some constants for use with the GridBagLayout.
  3. Color. This handles the foreground and background colors.
  4. Misc. Variable assignment is handled here.

The misc tab requires further explanation. It shows how the variable representing the component will be generated in the code. The component can be disabled or hidden using the first two checkboxes. The next choice is the scope of the variable within the class. You can choose to make the variable private, protected or public. Finally, you can choose how the variable name is assigned. If you choose to let Lava allocate a variable name, it will call is something obscure like lavaVar10010. You can give it a better name by choosing to allocate it your self and typing the name into the text field. You can also choose to make the component visible to the whole class by making it a class variable which will cause it to be defined at the top of the class instead of making it local to the makeGUI method.

Each component has a tab that enables indervidual properties to be edited.

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