When i add splitters, it acts as a layout, but also allows to resize the widgets in runtime. So, for example, i managed to lay out my widgets in this way:
Therefore, i can resize my widgets in runtime. As i noticed, this function is also available in designer mode, but it doesn't work properly. I tried to hover over my splitter and drag it in designer mode, but it only replaces the entire widget.
That is how does my main window look like in QtDesigner. I haven't tried to code yet. The problem is, that even though i used to set a stretch factor, my widegt's look in designer mode and in runtime completely differ. They have another sizes.
So, what are the problems:
Firstly, i can't change my widgets sizes properly, using stretch factors. I don't know, i tried to change size policies, but i did't manage to see an effect. I have somehow changed size of the vertically oriented widgets, but when speak about horizontal orientation - stretch factor and size policy doesn't change anything at all.
Secondly, i can't move my splitter in designer mode. It's position is constant, by default, it's always somewhere in the middle.
Thirdly, i have bugs (i think so) with my widget sizes in designer mode. They differ with widget's sizes in runtime.
Question:
So, how can i change widget's sizes properly? Maybe there's a way of moving a splitter in designer mode - do newer versions of Qt have it? Currently i'm using Qt 5.9.9. Also, why these bugs, and are they bugs at all. Maybe i just should update my Qt to newer versions to get access to newer functionalities?
Comment: I'm not sure if stretch factors work with layout as they do with widgets. I'm using layouts exactly the same way i use widgets. My layout's wrong(maybe) use may have caused this problem. Anyways, i'm entirely new to Qt, and may not know something to understand it completely.
Related
Main Question
What is the "right" way to give your widgets default sizes and make sure they contract, expand, or remain fixed if there is additional or not enough space to accommodate them?
How I Think Qt Works
After reading the Qt documentation it seems like the sizing algorithm goes something like this...the layout begins by asking its children for their ideal size via the QWidget::sizeHint method. If the layout has additional space or not enough space then it'll determine which widgets to resize based on each widget's sizing policy (QWidget::sizePolicy), minimum size (QWidget::minimumSize), and maximum size (QWidget::maximumSize).
Why isn't there a QWidget::setSizeHint method?
If my understanding is close to being accurate then it would seem all you'd have to do is set the sizeHint, sizePolicy, maximumSize, and minimumSize on each widget and everything would just work. So why isn't there a setSizeHint method?!?!??!! Sure, every time you use a widget that provides all of the functionality you need (QTableView, QComboBox, etc) you could extend it and override a single method but that sounds absolutely ridiculous.
One of the sizing issues I'm fighting with.
I've got a QMainWindow with a QDockWidget on the left hand side. The QDockWidget has a QTableView. I'd like to have the QDockWidget/QTableView take up a "reasonable" amount of space on start up and then the user can resize it however small or large they'd like.
Unfortunately, when the application starts up it gives the QDockWidget/QTableView so little space that it requires a horizontal scroll bar. The only way I've found to force it to give it a reasonable amount of width is to set the QDockWidget's minimum width but then it prevents the user from resizing it as small as they might like to.
Why isn't there a QWidget::setSizeHint method?
In my opinion it is much better for a widget to compute its preferred size based on its content (or rules) instead of allowing the coder to set a sizeHint probably hardcoded or at least prone to errors.
I almost never had to set a size on a widget, playing with the QSizePolicy was enough. And when I needed some specific constraints, playing with minimum/maximum sizes was enough. So that Qt layouts were always able to adapt the widget.
If you want to set up yourself some percentages on the sizes etc, you can play with the stretch parameter. You can also add spacers when you need empty spaces.
Extending a QWidget to override the QWidget::sizeHint method does not sound ridiculous to me, as you change the widget behaviour by changing its preferred size and that fits the polymorphism spirit of OOD.
How to properly size Qt widgets? is a vague question and depends on the use cases. Most of the time choosing the good layouts and size-policy lets you achieve very adaptative GUI. Qt Designer can help to do this right, even if the layout management is not always intuitive (you need to place your widgets first and then set them in layouts from the inner to the outer layout).
About your specific issue, it's hard to tell why your QDockWidget gets too small without knowing the details of the layout(s) you have around your two widgets in the window. Maybe it is a specific issue with QDockWidget : see related questions :
QDockWidget starting size
Qt 5.7 QDockWidget default size
Prevent QDockWidget autosizing behaviour
I'm working on application for embedded and we have 256x64 grayscale screen. Qt 5.3 perfectly renders on that screen with -platform linuxfb option. Obviously, we save every pixel of space, so I faced with trouble: Qt Designer adds excess 1 pixel spacing for every layout element deeper in hierarchy. So they accumulate for the most deep widgets. More precisely, for some reason child element of layout components gets coordinates (1,1) relative to parent. So, it's true for every widget except for root widget. Picture below demonstrates accumulated spacings (thin and thick red lines), and (1,1) coordinates of the very first child widget.
I believe it's Qt behavior itself, not just Qt Designer issue (not tested yet). But I can't work further even if it's shown in Designer only: I need to have pixel-exact view while designing.
Of course, every spacing and margin of every component in form set to 0.
Manual coordinates assigning (from code) eliminates the problem of course, but I need to generate code by uic.
So, my question is: how to avoid such spacings? Fixing Qt core sources can be (hard) option too, since anyway we recompile Qt for the project.
Mirror post on Qt forums
Thanks.
Ilia.
If you select Form > View Code, you can see that the geometry is not actually used for widgets which are inside a layout. So the numbers you see in the Property Editor are purely informational and have no relevance to the eventual code that is generated from the ui file (which is why they are greyed out).
The one pixel offset is there because Qt Designer needs space to draw the red boxes around layouts. They have to be be represented somehow, so I don't see how this can be avoided given the way Qt Designer currently works. If you want a more accurate reprentation of the final results, I suppose you will have to show a preview.
There is a facility in Settings > Preferences > Embedded Design that allows you to specify device profiles (which determine things like style, font, and screen resolution). This will add a new entry to the Preview In menu, which should allow you to refine the accuracy of the previews even further.
This is a screenshot of a QFormLayout holding a series of widgets. Note that the top and bottom input widgets are not horizontally aligned to the middle two rows. Note also that the labels on the left are not vertically aligned to the middle two rows.
The difference is that the top and bottom widgets are plain QLineEdit and QTextEdit widgets, the second row is a QWidget with a QHBoxLayout holding a QSpinBox and QDateTimeEdit, and the third is a QStackedLayout containing QWidgets each with a QHBoxLayout and API-supplied widgets inside those.
It looks like these middle two have extra margins. I can (partially) improve the situation by calling QLayout::setContentsMargins on the plain QWidgets' layouts. In fact, in the image above I already have, without that it's worse.
I haven't interfered with styles in the application, it's all system-default. This seems to affect Qt5 on Ubuntu 15.04, I don't think I saw this back when it was a Qt4 application.
I tried setStyleSheet ("QWidget {margin:0;}") in the top-level widget, that introduced all sorts of problems. I also tried the variation setStyleSheet (".QWidget {margin:0;}") but that had no effect. QLayout::setSpacing also had no effect, and setting padding:0 in the stylesheet doesn't fix it either.
Nothing I've tried seems to bring the spacing around these custom-layout QWidgets in line with the API-supplied widgets.
What have I missed? Thanks.
What you observe is both the struggle of multi-platform ui and the simple fact that some widgets are horrible. Given a limited amount of time and a big task, dev teams will not treat fairly the set of features. Powerful widgets and layouts like standard widgets, QGridLayout, will be maintained day and night to be defect free while legacy widgets like QStackedWidget will be pushed at the bottom of the maintenance queue.
I tried to reproduce your issue using designer alone and here is what I got (Qt 4.8) :
What you can see:
The second line with a widget container has great marging
The third line doesn't even show the combo box (I swear it's there!!).
My two cents :
There is a difference in behavior in the second row. Because I used Qt4 and you Qt5, and we both set the QHBoxLayout margin to zero then it means there is a potential regression at play, either in Qt5 or the linux implementation. So this confirms what you suspected.
QStackedWidget is horrible. It is the usual widget provided to give quick and basic functionality rather implementing the real deal. Here it would be a widget with a QStackedLayout. Like I said I suspect those kind of widgets to receive less love when big development efforts are required.
In these situations, use QGridLayout instead of a QStackedLayout of widgets with layout of widget. It will solve the issue of labels not being aligned. Difficult to set up at first but the result is usually neat.
By the way, I switched to a widget with a stackedlayout and here is the result :
I want to create a flexible layout, where the User can resize Widgets, but still give a good default layout. I'm using the Qt Designer for everything.
As a minimal example I used a simple Windows with a Widget and a plainTextEdit. The later one seems to cause the problems, which is why I choose it. At first I built it without the Splitter which worked just fine. The Stretching factors are 1:1 by the way.
Now I put both widgets in a Splitter (by breaking the main layout, putting both widgets in a Splitter and setting a new layout to the main widget). Resizing still works but the stretching factors behave weird:
The PlainTextEdit seems to take up far to much space. The Stretching Factors are still at 1:1. I found a workaournd, by changing the stretching of the upper widget to a much higher value (in this case 9:1), which looks good again:
So my question is: Why do the stretching factors begin to behave weird when I put the images in a Splitter? And how can I solve this without using arbitrary guessed stretching factors?
QSplitter::setSizes() can be used to set relative sizes. According to the documentation, "any additional/missing space is distributed amongst the widgets according to the relative weight of the sizes".
In this case, it is a bit ugly, since you have to add this in your code rather than editing your layout in QDesigner (normally, you would want to define your layout only at one place), but still it is quick and works:
MyWindow::MyWindow(QWidget* parent):
QWidget(parent)
{
m_Ui.setupUi(this);
m_Ui.splitter->setSizes({2000, 1000, 1000});
However, I had to use big numbers (instead of {2, 1, 1}), maybe because at this point, the window is not completely set up yet (apparently, Qt is not a big fan of RAII...). Also, this kind of notation works probably only with a recent C++ version, otherwise you can also define the QList in some extra lines.
I have a QT form that has literally hundreds of widgets and to make them all fit on the screen at once (as required) I need to make them pretty small. The Form will have fixed (non resizable) size when used. I can resize the widgets to the desired height/width and use the appropriate (small) font size, make their size policy "fixed" etc. However, as soon as I start putting them into layouts, they gow to some, much larger minimum size. This is particularly true for the height of the widgets, but width is sometimes affectged as well.
My problem would be solved if I knew how to do one of the three following things:
Change a layout's default minimum size(s) for widgets.
Force a layout not to alter widgets sizes.
Use Qt designer to nicely align widgets in grid-like formats without using layouts.
I searched extensively Qt designer's docs and SO, to no avail.
Help is greatly appreciated
Use layouts with QWidget::setFixedSize in code (or alternative you can set the fixed size policy for each widget in designer) or you can use QLayout::setSizeConstraint