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276 CHAPTER 8: Android UI Design: Using Advanced ViewGroup Layout Containers

Changing the Widget Order Inside of the GridLayout

If you had originally designed the Edit Galaxy Info UI by using nested tags, all of
the UI elements would have been grouped together in a (left side) vertical LinearLayout
and all of the UI elements would have been grouped together in a (right side) vertical
LinearLayout. If you had designed this UI using tags, you would have renamed the
outer (parent) to and deleted the nested tags, yielding
the resulting parent and child tag structure seen in Figure 8-9.

Figure 8-9. Changing the order of the UI widgets to group all of the and

widgets together

Let’s simulate this “grouped UI widget type” collection of widgets inside of the
container and see if the child widget order changes how the GridLayout engine will auto-arrange
the grid UI design. If it does, we will then ascertain if there are any “global” parameters which you
can add into your parent tag, in order to “correct” this new alignment back into the
EditText fields on the left, Buttons on the right, result which we are looking to achieve. This exercise
will allow you to better visualize how the GridLayout algorithm actually works!

To create this alternate UI widget order seen in Figure 8-9, you need to cut and paste the first three

UI widgets underneath the last Button widget. Make sure to maintain the ID order of
submit_colony, submit_pop, submit_fleet, and submit_ships.

It is important to note that once you add in the layout_row and layout_column child UI widget
parameters, which you will be doing a bit later on in this chapter, the widget order inside of this
GridLayout layout container will no longer matter, as you will be specifying the grid location or grid
index values directly.