About BorderLayout

BorderLayout arranges a container's components in areas named North, South, East, West, and Center.

The components in North and South are given their preferred height and are stretched across the full width of the container.
The components in East and West are given their preferred width and are stretched vertically to fill the space between the north and south areas.
A component in the Center expands to fill all remaining space.

layoutborder example

BorderLayout is good for forcing components to one or more edges of a container, and for filling up the center of the container with a component. It is also the layout you want to use to cause a single component to completely fill its container.

You will probably find BorderLayout to be the most useful layout manager for the larger containers in your UI. By nesting a panel inside each area of the BorderLayout, then populating each of those panels with other panels of various layouts, you can achieve quite complicated UI designs.

Components are positioned in one of five areas within a BorderLayout, based on the constraints property. You can set the constraints property for the component in the Inspector to one of the following values: North, South, East, West, or Center.

For example, to put a toolbar across the top of a BorderLayout container, you could create a FlowLayout panel of buttons and place it in the North area of the container. You do this by selecting the panel and choosing North for its constraints property in the Inspector.

To set the constraints property:

Select the component you want to position, either in the Java Visual Editor or the Structure window.
Select the constraints property in the Inspector, and click its value field.
Click the down arrow on the constraints property dropdown list and select the area you want the component to occupy.
Press Enter or click anywhere else in the Property Inspector to commit the change to code.

If you use JDeveloper's Java Visual Editor to change the layout of an existing container to BorderLayout, the components near the edges automatically move to fill the closest edge. A component near the center may be set to Center. If a component moves to an unintended location, you can correct the constraints property in the Inspector, or drag the component to a new position in the Java Visual Editor.

Each of the five areas can contain any number of components (or panel of components), however, unless the topmost component is not opaque, any lower components in the same area will be covered by the topmost one.

The following are some general guidelines for working with multiple components and BorderLayout:

Make sure the container has no more than five components.
Use XYLayout first to move the components to their approximate intended positions, with only one component near each edge.
Group multiple components in an area into a panel before converting.

Note:BorderLayout ignores the order in which you add components to the container.

By default, a BorderLayout puts no gap between the components it manages. However, you can use the Inspector to specify the horizontal or vertical gap in pixels for a BorderLayout associated with a container.

To modify the gap surrounding BorderLayout components, select the BorderLayout object in the Structure window (displayed immediately below the container it controls), then modify the pixel value in the Property Inspector for the hgap and vgap properties.