Grid Layout

The Grid Layout helps to place UI controls within the parent window. It is similar to PyQt’s QGridLayout or Tkniter’s Grid geometry manager. The Grid Layout is implemented through setGeometry and placeControl methods of a base PyXBMCt class.

Warning

Currently PyXBMCt does not support changing window geometry at runtime so you must call setGeometry method only once.

To place a control you simply provide it as the 1st positional argument to placeControl method, and then specify a row and a column for the control as the next arguments, and the control will be placed in a specific grid cell. This eliminates the need to provide exact coordinates for each control and then fine-tune them. If a control needs to occupy several grid cells, you can provide rowspan and/or columspan parameters to specify how many cells it should take.

Note

Row and column numbers start from zero, i.e. the top-left cell will have row# = 0, column# = 0.

The placeControl medhod does not actually check if a control will actually be placed within the parent window. By providing a row and/or a column number which exceeds row and/or column count of the parent window, a control can be placed outside the window, intentionally or unintentionally. You need to check the visual appearance of your addon window and correct positions of controls, if necessary.

The Grid Layout also works with xbmcgui Controls, but when instantiating an xbmcgui Control you need to provide it with fake coordinates and size. Any integer values will do.

Tip

The size and aspect of an individual control can be adjusted with pad_x and pad_y parameters of placeControl method. By default, both padding values equal 5.