Guide Layout Enhancements

The Guide Layout is a powerful and flexible layout that provides for a more natural way of designing and laying out forms. The layout allows cross container alignment of components making it easy to align nested components. The layout also allows for relative positioning so that components can be positioned at locations like 10 pixels right of the centre or 10% left or the right hand side.

In Aria 4.0 the guide layout is undergoing some enhancement and one of these enhancements: the display of guides at runtime, is designed to make it easier to code and debug the layout at runtime. The Aria page designed provides an interactive visual way of creating guide layouts, but sometimes pages are coded from the XML and such a page designed may not be used. In other cases the guides can be used across forms and with varying content and hence the design time configuration may not apply.

Being able to clearly see the guides makes tweaking them easy :-)

The attached screenshot shows the guides in use in the MetroBank example.

To enable the runtime display of guides simple add the following entry to your application's startup.properties:

  DrawGuides=true