Chapter 4: Laying Out UI Elements

In the previous chapters, you learned how to build simple UIs. Although they consisted of just a few UI elements, they needed to arrange their buttons, text fields, and sliders in a particular order, direction, or hierarchy. Layouts position and size their content in a way specific to this layout, such as horizontally (Row()) or vertically (Column()). This chapter explores layouts in greater detail.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Using predefined layouts
• Understanding the single measure pass
• Creating custom layouts

We will start by exploring the predefined layouts of Row(), Column(), and Box(). You will learn how to combine them to create beautiful UIs. Next, I'll introduce you to ConstraintLayout. It places composables that are relative to others on the screen and uses attributes to flatten the UI element hierarchy. This is an alternative to nesting Row(), Column(), and Box().

The second main...