Hello, I am modifying a small application that was designed with the NetBeans GUI builder. One of the JPanels displays three JTables side-by-side. The JTables have three columns and are inside of individual JScrollPanes. My task is to add more tables to display additional data. The JTable columns were very wide, in order to fully display the widest expected data. Unfortunately, this often leaves much dead space in the tables that could be reclaimed to display more tables.
I have modified the JTables to nicely adjust their column widths to match the actual data, but I cannot get the JScrollPanes to shrink down to the width of the optimized JTables. Thus, there is often a bunch of wasted empty white space in the JScrollPanes. After the data is added to the table, table.getPreferredScrollableViewportSize() correctly reports the size of the viewport to display the optimized table, but I cannot figure out how to change the JScrollPane width from the size that it is set to in the GUI Designer to match the viewport size requested by the JTable; scrollpane.setSize() and scrollpane.setPreferredSize() don't seem to have any effect. It seems that the upstream Swing objects aren't querying the JTables for display information after the data is added. Internet search indicates that (in addition to a general disdain for GUI builders) this may be due to the GroupLayout layout manager used by the NetBeans GUI builder or some other limitations of how layout is done in the GUI Builder. Any thoughts on how to get the JScrollPane to resize? My second challenge would be making this JPanel horizontally scrollable. Even using JTables with optimized column widths, with the number of tables I have to add, the JPanel would end up wider than a feasible desktop window size. I tried adding the JTables/JScrollPanels into one larger JScrollPanel with the GUI Builder, but the GUI Builder does not seem to be able to do that. Is it feasible to do what I need to do with the NetBeans GUI builder, or do I need to scrap the existing GUI Builder JPanel and switch to a manually coded/designed JPanel? Thank You! Joe Huber Standard Refrigeration LLC
