I would like to render a series of complex data in a scrollable list using Qt5. Since the source of the data is a timeline, I'd like to load it lazily --- that is, I would like to use the features of QAbstractItemModel to load data on demand. The views will be read-only.
Can I use a custom widget to display data in each cell of the list?
So far I've seen some suggestions:
use QAbstractItemView->setIndexWidget(); however, because I'd like to load the data lazily, it seems needlessly expensive to create and set widgets for all indices, before the data is loaded.
use QAbstractItemView->setItemDelegate() with a custom QStyledItemDelegate that overrides paint(). The result looked good, but the widgets were simply rendered, and not interactive (couldn't select text, etc).
You can do it with QGraphicsScene or even with QScrollArea + your custom widgets. It is not necessary to use QAbstractItemModel everywhere.
If you will use custom widgets for each model item you, probably, will have performance and interactivity problem.
Ofc, you can write a custom delegate, but delegates with interactivity is very complex topic - it is necessary to handle mouse events manually, draw a selection, etc.
Related
How do you use QStyledItemDelegate / QItemDelegate to permanently display a complex widget, i.e. to handle the Qt.DisplayRole, not just Qt.EditRole?
The documentation eludes to using paint()... but that's just way to complex! Let's take for example rendering a QTreeView or QTableVeiw inside of a QTableView cell.
There is QAbstractItemView.setIndexWidget(), but that is a bad idea as it only used to display static content (and whats the fun in static models?).
Note
I found part of the answer in another post, but it was only a small subset of the answer, so I thought it warranted a new post with proper question.
The key is to use QAbstractItemView.openPersistentEditor() to always keep the cell in edit mode.
Some additional key elements
The Qt.EditRole flag will need to be provided for the cells which use delegates.
QStyledItemDelegate.sizeHintChanged.emit(index) needs to be called anytime the size of the editor widget has changed.
Implementing QStyledItemDelegate.sizeHint() can be tricky and tedious (or you can do index.internalPointer().editor_widget.sizeHint() assuming you saved a reference of the editor to the internal pointer during QStyledItemDelegate.createEditor()
here is a good post on how to determine sizes: What are the mechanics of the default delegate for item views in Qt?
Caution
It should be mentioned that opening editors is costly, so if you have thousands of indexes and they are all loaded at once, it can take a while. There are many ways to mitigate this issue:
Load the model incrementally using a thread
Use Qt's fetchMore() mechanism
call openPersistentEditor incrementally (using a timer, or as they come into view for the first time)
call openPersistentEditor when the parent is expanded and closePersistentEditor when the parent is collapsed, and possibly restrict the use of expand-all on nodes with many children.
We would like to do a TableView that allows complex content in its cells.
The TableView should be as generic that I can do simple stuff like in picture 1. The left image is a simple example, where I fill a simple TableModel, set it for the TableView and display it.
But what if I want to add more complex content to one cell? Please again look at the first picture. The right part is more complex, for every cell we want to display an image, a description, and more description, so three items in one cell.
I understand, that I can put widgets to the cells of a TableView.
But, if I want to have a proper TableModel in the background, how would I store the data?
On top, the view should automatically resize when I make the widget of the TableView smaller the content should adapt
So if I use TableView and want to resize, I would have to shovel the content from one colum to another.
From what I understand, the columns also define the layout.
Would I be better of if I used a QGridLayout for this purpose?
Do I have to define a completely new model for QGridLayout?
Thanks for any help!
I am a newbie to QT and would appreciate your input a lot!
Qt's proposed solution to having a complex view in each cell of a table view is to use a custom delegate. Take a look at Star Delegate example, it demonstrates exactly this technique.
There are basically two options to proceed with a custom delegate: either you subclass QStyledItemDelegate (or its base class QItemDelegate if you need to draw the items of Qt's datatypes somewhat specially) or subclass QAbstractItemDelegate to have the full control over the delegate's appearance and behaviour.
However, your second requirement of automatic layout rearrangement on widget resizing suggests that your view doesn't really has to follow the underlying table's schema. Qt has a flow layout example which implements a layout with exactly this rearrange-on-resize property and I suppose the simplest approach would be just using this layout along with custom widgets representing the table model's cells. To make it happen you could implement a custom view class listening to the model's signals and creating/deleting widgets and updating the flow layout as necessary. This book, even though a little outdated nowadays as it covers Qt4, contains a chapter (#6) on implementing a custom view which is not a subclass of QAbstractItemView but is just a widget updating itself as its underlying model updates. To me it feels the right approach to your problem.
We can implement our own delegate to display rich text or images, but ListView can print static item only. You can't put "real" items into it, you can just paint them.
So, there isn't a way to show clickable hyperlink, ReTweet buttons, or load asynchronous images. Just think about a timeline-listview for Facebook or Twitter. That's what I'm working on.
Now, my solution is writing my listview in QML. Other widget are still native Qt widget. (I don't like a non-native pure QML user interface.)
QML is really flexible when doing that kind of work. Then export my model, finally put a viewer into my QMainWindow. But coding in two programming languages and trying to communicate with other native widget is really difficult.
So, what's the best way to display dynamic element?
The MVC framework is not very good for this kind of work.
To do it properly, you would need to provide a delegate for whatever dynamic types you need to display, and then provide an external mechanism that forces the model to emit dataChanged(const QModelIndex& topLeft, const QModelIndex& bottomRight) whenever these types need redrawing. It gets worse with interactive content because you would need to force an update on mouse overs in order to trigger the delegate painting.
For stuff like this you are better off using QGraphicsScene/View. Rather than rely on a model, each item can take of itself and you still get only essential repaints (via it's BSP structure), plus you have the option of hardware acceleration.
I'm trying to make a subclass of QTableView that has an embedded QLineEdit at the top for filtering the results as-you-type. I need my table to have the same API as a normal QTableView, so I want to subclass it rather than subclassing QWidget and adding a QLineEdit and QTableView to it.
I thought I could just re-implement paintEvent(QPaintEvent*), alter the QPaintEvent's rect() to start a bit lower (the height of a QLineEdit, so it draws under it) and then pass it thru to QTableView::paintEvent(), but the QPaintEvent argument only dictates what region needs to be repainted, not the region where the widget should be painted.
Anything you do in this regard is going to be hacky and result in just as much work (probably more work) as manually mapping all of the signals and slots to a child widget. You'll need to do a lot more than just change the paint events, you'd also have to adjust all of the mouse events, adjust any update rectangles, etc.
Alternatively you could just take the QTableView class from the Qt source and modify it directly (though that will probably break the LGPL and require you to publish your source if you don't have a commercial license.) But the easiest clean method is going to be implementing a container widget with the QTableView as a child.
I would try overriding the paintEvent, changing the widget::pos to be abit lower than it is and call QTableView::paintEvent()
I have to agree with Daniel: I don't think this is the right approach. You will likely want to create a custom widget with a line edit for performing the filtering. Otherwise, you will be entering into the challenging world of Qt hacking.
If you really need to provide access to the QTableView interface then simply add a public get method that returns a reference to the table.
This is somewhat similar to how Qt provides a QTabWidget class that inherits QWidget but has a private QTabBar that it uses internally. One significant difference is that it provides a protected tabBar() accessor rather than a public one.
I've got a QTableView for which I want to display the last column always in edit mode. (It's a QComboBox where the user should be able to always change the value.)
I think I've seen the solution in the Qt documentation, but I can't find it anymore. Is there a simple way of doing it?
I think I could archive this effect by using openPersistentEditor() for every cell, but I'm looking for a better way. (Like specifying it only one time for the whole column.)
One way to get the automatic editing behaviour is to call the view's setEditTriggers() function with the QAbstractItemView::AllEditTriggers value.
To display the contents of a given column in a certain way, take a look at QAbstractItemView::setItemDelegateForColumn(). This will let you specify a custom delegate just for those items that need it. However, it won't automatically create an editor widget for each of them (there could in principle be thousands of them), but you could use the delegate to render each item in a way that makes it look like an editor widget.
There are two possibilities:
Using setIndexWidget, but Trolltech writes:
This function should only be used to
display static content within the
visible area corresponding to an item
of data. If you want to display custom
dynamic content or implement a custom
editor widget, subclass QItemDelegate
instead.
(And it breaks the Model/View pattern…)
Or using a delegate's paint method. But here you have to implement everything like enabled/disabled elements yourself.
The QAbstractItemModel::flags virtual function is called to test if an item is editable (see Qt::ItemIsEditable). Take a look at Making the Model Editable in the Model/View Programming documentation.
I can't see an easy way to do this, but you might be able to manage by using a delegate. I honestly don't know exactly how it would work, but you should be able to get something working if you try hard enough. If you get a proper delegate, you should be able to set it on a whole view, one cell of a view, or just a column or row.