This page is for application designers who want to know more details about how to set sizes and positions for layout components.

Overview

When you are designing GUI screens for an application, it can be tricky to get the various components to size and to change in response to different screens (desktop or mobile).

When changing the size and position of layout components, you need to choose which level you want to apply the change. In the properties tab for layout components there are three sections you can use:

• Position Settings: set these common size and position options that only affect the selected layout component
• CSS Properties: also applies only to this component. CSS Properties lets you set less common CSS options, such as z-index.
• Shared Styles: you can set the size and position once and then apply it multiple components by sharing the style.

Positioning

Position settings can be:

• absolute, where set the location of a component with in its parent.  This can be useful where you want a component to always appear in the same place, for example a logo. However, it prevents the component from flowing with other things on the screen.
• relative, the component is positioned relative to siblings. This allows items to flow or flex. Use relative positioning if you want your application layout to be responsive to different screen sizes.

Absolute or Fixed Position

For example to fix something to the top left of its parent area, set Position Settings  Top to 0 and Left to 0. Where you have a fixed layout component combined with components that have relative positioning, be aware that:

• the fixed component's size depends on the Position Settings → Width and Height. If no value is set it will have the default minimum size.
• other components will flow over the top of a fixed component. This is because components default to a z-index of 1. z-index controls the in front/behind position.

Bringing a fixed object to the front

If you have a fixed component behind another component, you can move it to be in front using the  z-index. By default objects have a z-index of 1. To move something in front, in CSS Properties set:

• CSS Tag:  z-index
• Value to be greater than 1.
  2 is sufficient to bring a component to the front. However, if you use a larger increment, for example 10, this give you flexibility for adding more layers if they are needed later.

Relative Position

By setting the properties on a parent area, you can determine how the child objects are positioned relative to each other.

To set how components align, use Style Settings → Direction

• Row puts components next to each other until the horizontal space is filled. It will then start a new row.
• Column puts components below each other until the vertical space is filled. it will then start a new column.

Additional style settings affect the child objects. The following settings provide very responsive design.

• Wrap: Wrap - allows components to start a new row or column when all space is filled.  This also means when the screen size changes, the components will flow onto additional rows, rather than disappearing off-screen.
• Justify: Flex Start - tells the first component to be in the top left
• Align: Stretch - tells each component to stretch to fit the available space. If all components fit on one row, then the components extend to fill the vertical space. If components have to wrap to form a second row, each row will occupy half the vertical space.

There is a Theme 2 demonstration dashboard that you can use to see how this works. In the repository Packages section navigate to Theme2 - App Builder. Right-click T2 - Example Dashboard. and select Display. When you resize the screen, you can see that the different areas move to remain visible in the smaller window.

Size

To size layout components on a dashboard you can use

Width Height

Proportional, percentage

Autosize - works with flex box to take up space

Push depending on children

TILE - area 

properties Position Settings

Fixed size using pixels

Width: 300px

Height: 300px

Fixed size using percentage

Width: 75px

Height: 75px

Autosize depends on the parent object having a flex box set

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