Group class can be used to lay out a number of children in various ways. When the parent's size changes, groups relayout their children which can be very useful to create windows that are freely resizable in all directions.
The following different group types are supported by RapaGUI:
<hgroup>
<vgroup>
<colgroup>
<scrollgroup>
Column groups are useful if you need to have identical widget sizes for
all your children in a group for a more pleasant visual appearance. For
example, imagine a form made up of text entry widgets and text objects. It
is recommended to use a <colgroup>
here because it leads to a clear
and ordered visual appearance. Here's an example:
<colgroup columns="2"> <label>Name</label> <textentry/> <label>Street</label> <textentry/> <label>City</label> <textentry/> <label>Zip code</label> <textentry/> <label>Country</label> <textentry/> <label>Telephone</label> <textentry/> <label>Email</label> <textentry/> </colgroup> |
If we used a <vgroup>
with one <hgroup>
per row the
appearance would be pretty bad because the text entry widget's width would
be different for each line which looks pretty ugly.
Note that Group class doesn't derive from Area class because groups do not exist as physical widgets but they are just layout tools for their child widgets or groups. This is why you cannot use attributes and methods from Area class on group objects.