How to achieve better caching control for ListView? - qt

Question

I tried to play with cacheBuffer, but it's only help me to increase count of cached delegates, when I want to disable caching at all.
Now with zero caching buffer my example (only one item stretched on all ListView) behaves like this:
At the start ListView creates two delegates: currently visible and
next one.
When I scrolling list forward it creates and keep up to 4 delegates without beginning destroying them.
When I start scrolling list backward it begin immediately destroying delegates without looking on cacheBuffer.
If you replace "height: root.height" to "height: listView.height", it will create delegates for all model items at the start.
Is this behaviour normal? Can I change it some way?
You can tried it yourself:
import QtQuick 2.11
import QtQuick.Controls 2.4
import QtQuick.Window 2.11
import Qt.labs.calendar 1.0
Window {
id: root
visible: true
width: 640
height: 480
title: qsTr("Hello World")
ListView {
id: listView
anchors.fill: parent
snapMode: ListView.SnapOneItem
cacheBuffer: 0
model: 10
delegate: Rectangle {
width: parent.width
height: root.height
// height: listView.height
border.color: "black"
Text {
anchors.centerIn: parent
text: modelData
}
Component.onCompleted: {
console.log("Delegate completed")
}
Component.onDestruction: {
console.log("Delegate destruction")
}
}
}
}

Answer 1

Replace
delegate: MyVeryComplexDelegate {
}
by
delegate: Loader {
width: expectedDelegateWidth
height: expectedDelegateHeight // Otherwise you might create all...
sourceComponent: MyVeryComplexDelegate {
}
active: someCriteriaYouFeelGoodAbout()
}
Now you will only have simple Loaders in your cache and you can decide which ones of those in the cache are active.
Probably better: Have parts of the MyVeryComplexDelegate loaded as the ListView wants, and just hide the most complex parts behind a Loader that turns active only if you really need the full complexity.
On your strange findings as far as I can explain them:
Regarding the difference between root.height and listView.height, the explanation is an issue that is subject to many questions:
While root.height references the property height of the window, which you have explicitly set, listView.height is determined by anchors.fill: parent, which results in setting the height to root.contentItem.height - and that is initially 0. Therefore the delegates, initially all have a height of 0, all of them would fit in the view and therefor have to be created, even if you load as lazy as possible. Later they will resize together with the root.contentItem and some will be destroyed again.
You can see that, when monitoring the height changes of your delegates and your ListView
The next thing is, that even if the delegate really fills the ListView from the beginning, a second delegate is instantiated. The reason for that is, the condition used by the ListView, when to create new delegates. For that the sum of heights - the displacement of the first has to be larger than the ListView. That is not fulfilled when it is equal to the height.
Increase the height of your delegate by a fraction of a pixel, and you are good.
height: root.height + 0.0001