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236 CHAPTER 7: Making Apps Interactive: Intents, Event Handling, and Menus

The next four parameters allow you to align your UI widgets relative to the parent UI layout
container, and the ones listed after those will allow you to center your UI widgets, relative to their
parent UI layout container. As you might well imagine, when all of these parameters are utilized
together in conjunction inside of each of your component UI design widgets, you can achieve just
about any UI layout design result that you can imagine.

What is really powerful about RelativeLayout is that when your user changes their Android hardware
device’s orientation from portrait (up and down, or vertical) to landscape (side to side, or
horizontal), your relative layout design can “morph” to conform to the new display screen shape!
Let’s start learning about some of these relative layout parameters!

Since we want our UI widget to be located to the right of our UI widget, the
first UI layout parameter that we will want to implement inside of the UI element is the
android:layout_toRightOf parameter. To tell the parameter what other UI element we want to lay it
out relative to, we use an ID parameter to give it that reference point. So, to position the Button UI
widget that you named submit_colony to the right of the EditText UI widget named edit_colony, you
would use the following XML tag and parameter configuration:

This will make sure that the

named submit_colony is positioned to the right of the

named edit_colony. However, as you will soon see, it will not necessarily align these
two UI elements attractively, nor will it position your UI elements in the Y axis (above or below)
dimension, only within the X axis (side to side) dimension. This is why a number of RelativeLayout
positioning and alignment parameters must be utilized in conjunction with one another in order to
achieve a fine-tuned and professional UI layout design result.

Figure 7-18. Add the RelativeLayout parameter android:layout_toRightOf inside the

child tag UI widget