What does setWidth("*") do in CSS / SmartGWT?

Question

I've come across some legacy code which uses SmartGWT. I suspect the API is present in standard GWT too.

widget.setWidth("*");

Keeping in mind that the same bit of code has:

otherWidget.setWidth100();

I'm not aware that CSS has anything like:

width: *;

So... is this code legitimate and if so what does it do... or not?!

Thanks in advance.

I don't know... `auto`, perhaps? – BoltClock Jan 11 '11 at 20:27 — BoltClock, Jan 11 '11 at 20:27

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 17 '13 at 18:15

6

In SmartGWT .setWidth("*") means take up the rest of the available width. For example, if you have a HPanel with two children and one of the children has setWidth("10%") then implicitly the child with setWidth("*") will have 90% width. This allows you to change the width of one child without having to update the other setWidth call.

edited Jan 17 '13 at 18:15

answered Jan 13 '11 at 14:00

minichate

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It's perfectly llustrated by the showcase: http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#layout_layout one can see the two fixed percentage column and the rest when resizing the window – Alain BUFERNE Jan 21 '13 at 14:36

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 21 '13 at 10:00

Consider that you have a Panel with two children. Now if you set setWidth("*") for both child then the first child will take the required width and the second child will get whatever is left.

If you set setWidth("60%") for the first child and setWidth("*") for the second child then first child will take 60% of the width of the Panel and the second child will get the remaining 40%.

.setWidth100(); and .setHeight100(); these 2 make the component fill the canvas it is in. This mean set width & height 100% which is equivalent to setWidth("100%") and setHeight("100%") respectively.

This is basically used when you don't specifically want to set the widths of the child panel's. You specify a rough width of the first child panel and the width of the second child is automatically set.

What does setWidth("*") do in CSS / SmartGWT?

2 Answers2