A (175)

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

As you can see in Figure 8 -1 3 , the GridLayout engine is now correctly placing the UI
widgets in the correct column index zero and row 0 through 3 grid locations, leaving the grid locations
next to these EditText UI elements empty. The GridLayout algorithm auto-layout feature then places
the Button UI elements after the EditText UI elements, since we have not yet specified the Button UI
element grid index values of column index 1 and row 0 through 3, which we are going to do next.

The parameters for the child UI widgets will be similar to the ones you added in the

child tags. In fact, if you like, you can copy and paste these parameters from the
tags into the tags. Once you do this, make sure that you set the second series
of layout_column index values to “1” and then use the same layout_row values, ranging from “0” to
“3,” as is shown in the following XML markup:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<GridLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:id="@+id/gridLayout"
android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:background="@drawable/editgalaxyscreen" android:orientation="vertical"
android:columnCount="2" android:rowCount="4" android:useDefaultMargins="true" >
<EditText android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:id="@+id/edit_colony" android:hint="@string/hint_colony" android:layout_row="0"
android:textColorHint="#FFFFFF" android:textColor="#FFFFFF" android:layout_column="0" />
<EditText android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:id="@+id/edit_pop" android:hint="@string/hint_pop" android:layout_row="1"
android:textColor="#FFFFFF" android:textColorHint="#FFFFFF" android:layout_column="0" />
<EditText android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content"

Figure 8-13. The UI elements with the layout_row parameters, setting locations 0 through 3