Extra Unity UI components

The Unity UI package provides a decent range of components that can be used for creating a graphical user interface. Quite complicated interfaces can easily be created between various visual and interactive components, as well as components used to create dynamic layouts.

Some designs might however benefit from a component or two that is provided by default. This repository contains a selection of components that might help with make those designs a reality.

FlexibleGridLayoutGroup

Unity UI does provide a component for laying out UI elements in a grid - GridLayoutGroup - but that component is a tad limited in its uses. This due to it ignoring practically all properties of any ILayoutComponent its "cells" might have.

The GridLayoutGroup assigns each cell the same width and height. This could end up smaller than its minWidth/minHeight. Also, the space available to the grid is hardly used, despite some cells potentially benefitting from it (such long lines of text).

FlexibleGridLayoutGroup is intended as an improvement that does take the minimum, preferred, and flexible size of its cells into account.

The minimum, preferred, and flexible size of each column and row is based on the the highest respective property; width based for columns, height for rows. Any amount of space available to the grid is

1. Allocate each row and column its minimum width and height, based on respectively the widest element in the column and heighest element in the row
2. A portion of the remaining space (if any) is allocated to each column and row based on how much their preferred size contributed to the grid preferred size (compared to minimum size), up until they reach their preferred size.
3. Any columns and rows that have a flexible size other than 0 share the remaining amount of space in a ratio based on their flexible size.

Options

Property	Default	Description
spacing	0, 0	Amount of pixels between each column (x) and row (y).
columns	1	Number of columns in the grid. Rows are automatically generated based on this value and the number of cells.

Known issues

• No known issues