How to have a NinePatchRect resize to it's children

[mint brook]

Stupid question, but i've been using a NinePatchRect as my dialogbox main nodes. Everything works great but now I am trying to add content to the boxes (NPC portrait for example) and the NinePatchRect doesnt seem to have a feature to "resize to children". Im using HBoxContainers and VBoxContainers to layout the content, and they do resize fine. I wish my NinePatchRect could easily resize to the VBoxContainer in it which is already sized right.

I know I could do it with gdscript, but it's not going to be easy to design the dialogs as doing it in the inspector/viewport. So I would but only if it's the only option. Sounds so rudimentary that I am sure there's a way to do it with the interface.

How do people normally do it? Google doesn't return great answers, and AI had me turning in circles for an hour already 😛

Here is my current node structure:
DialogManager (Node)
└─ DialogBox (NinePatchRect)
└─ VBoxContainer (VBoxContainer)
├─ HBoxContainer (HBoxContainer)
│ └─ PortraitSlot (Control)
│ ├─ PortraitFrame (TextureRect)
│ └─ PortraitImage (TextureRect)
├─ DialogText (Label)
└─ HBoxContainer2 (HBoxContainer)
└─ Button (Button)
├─ ButtonLabel (Label)
└─ ButtonControl (Control)

[burnt dirge]

It's actually sneaky.

Create a PanelContainer. With theme override properties or with a custom theme, set it's panel style box to a new StyleBoxTexture. Adjust the texture margins and stretch, it works exactly like the nine patch. This can work with anything that supports style boxes.

[mint brook]

im going to try that later on. thank you so so much, been discouraged 😛