JDev 12c: Multi Line Button

An interesting question came up in the JDeveloper & ADF ODC space. A user asked how to display a button which shows a long text in multiple lines.

The image above shows an af:button with a longer text. If you don’t have enough space in your layout to show such a long text in a button, you can shorten the Text. If this is not a acceptable, one solution is to break the long text into multiple lines.

Think about an af:panelSplitter which should show the same button

but the space i for the left pane in the splitter s limited. The result will be that the text of the button can’t be read. In other layouts the button might overflow the given space. his can crumble your whole page layout.

In this blog I’ll show you how to design a button which can handle this situation by showing the text in multiple lines. The green dotted rectangles shows the size of the layout container. This is for information only.

As you see in the image above, the text of the button breaks into multiple lines if the space is not wide enough to show it in one line. If we move the splitter to the right you see the effect

Solution

The solution is to create a style class for the button which we use for button which should be able to show their text in multiple lines. This style class is put into a skin to make it available to the ADF application.

.multiLineButton af|button::text {
    white-space: normal; 
}

The usage of the style class is simple as we see in the sample code for the af:panelSplitter

<af:panelSplitter id="ps1" splitterPosition="100" orientation="horizontal" dimensionsFrom="parent">
	<f:facet name="first">
	        <af:button text="This Button has a very long text to show" id="b3"/>
        </f:facet>
        <f:facet name="second">
                <af:button text="This Button has a very long text to show" id="b4"
                           styleClass="multiLineButton"/>
        </f:facet>
</af:panelSplitter>

You can download the sample BlogMultilineButton (or the zipped workspace) from GihHub. The code was developed using JDeveloper 12.2.1.3 and doesn’t use a DB connection.