CS5 ScriptUI dialogs open with no minimum width or height

Question

Hi There,
Running my script as ScriptUI in CS5 seems to cause a strange issue with window drawing / resizing.  I am unable to reproduce the issue in CS6 or CC.  In some cases, when I run the script targeting CS5 from within ESTK, the initial window panel will appear very small and requires a user to resize it until it becomes totally visible.  Also, when I spawn a new dialog window from within a button's click handler, the dialog displays, but appears to have no specified or determined width or height.  As a workaround, I set the "resizing" for the dialog to true even though I would prefer not to let the user resize this particular dialog.  I tried setting preferredSize on almost all the elements so that I could minimize the use of automatic layout, but that didn't seem to do the trick.
Has anybody encountered this?  Does CS5 require that the Bounds property is set?  It doesn't seem to be the case for CS6+
If anyone has encountered this type of UI issue in CS5, any help or suggestions to fix would be appreciated.
Thank you for your time and help!
--Arie

Answer 1

You can't "minimize the use of automatic layout". Either you use it, either you don't.
I can't speak for others, but when using layout.layout(true), i often have to do many tries until "it behaves as i wanted to" (which actually means: until i find how things should be written).
There are few rules though, and one is that preferredSize is irreliable, better use minimumSize and maximumSize (can't remember where i read that but i did, probably in the Javascript Tools Guide).
What i do all the time is create a big group (in the exemple below it is called 'content') within the window and specify min or max dimensions for that group, not the window itself.
Also, if you dont want the window to be resized, just set its creation property 'resizeable' to false.
var win = new Window("palette", "myScript", undefined, {resizeable: false});
win.alignChildren = ['left', 'top'];
win.margins=8;
win.content = win.add("group{ orientation:'column', margins: 0, spacing: 5, alignChildren:['left', 'top'],\
                                            " /* more stuff here */  + "\
win.content.minimumSize = [500,300];
win.layout.layout(true);
win.layout.resize();
win.show();
If this doesnt help, please provide a bit of your code. I have CS5.5 and never encountered your issue.
Xavier.