How does memory management work on close modal dialog - qt

If I invoke the dialog this way:
void foo()
{
QMessageBox* dlg = new QMessageBox( QMessageBox::Critical, "Error", "Unknown Error" );
dlg->exec();
}
Will the memory be freed after user have closed the dialog?
Please, point me to the appropriate doc, because I can’t find one.

There's no single piece of documentation.
The QMessageBox is a QObject. It can be owned by a parent widget. It can also be deleted by the event loop when you call deleteLater.
Any top-level QWidget can have the Qt::WA_DeleteOnClose attribute set - it will self-delete when it gets closed.
In your case, since you're calling the (discouraged) blocking exec() method, you don't need to allocate the dialog on the heap. It could be an automatic variable:
QMessageBox dlg(QMessageBox::Critical, "Error", "Unknown Error");
dlg.exec();
Ideally, though, you should show the dialog and have it set up to delete itself upon closure:
QScopedPointer<QMessageBox> dlg(new QMessageBox(QMessageBox::Critical, "Error", "Unknown Error"));
dlg->setAttribute(Qt::WA_DeleteOnClose);
dlg.take()->show();
The smart pointer is used to prevent leaks in case the constructor were to fail, or if you changed the code later and there was a code path that missed show(). If the dialog is not shown, it would not ever be deleted - here, the smart pointer takes care of it. Either the dialog is shown, and deletes itself, or it is deleted by the pointer.

Not by itself but you can connect finished to deleteLater and it will. Although creating a concrete instance on the stack like Matthew suggested is better

In your case it will leak the memory associated with dlg.
You want to change your code to be:
void foo()
{
// Stack allocation is faster than heap allocation.
// It also communicates the lifetime of the object better.
QMessageBox dlg( QMessageBox::Critical, "Error", "Unknown Error" );
// This will block until the user closes the message.
int result = dlg.exec();
} // dlg will be release upon losing scope here.
See QMessageBox::exec

Related

Send signal data from QMainwindow to QDialog

I am going to send data collected in the QMainWindow to an object of QDialog via signal-slot connections. Here is the relevant code fragment to do this in mainwindow.cpp:
void MainWindow::on_dialogA_clicked()
{
if(dialogA==NULL) dialogA =new MyDialog();
//'this' refers to MainWindow
connect(this,SIGNAL(sendData(QVector<bool>)), dialogA, SLOT(getData(QVector<bool>)), Qt::QueuedConnection);
dialogA->show();
}
However when working with dialogA, it seems that the data are not updated properly and the dialog interface becomes Not responding after while. I wonder if the signal-slot connection above is right or not, or that is the way to have data communication with a QDiaglog.
Two things...first, switch to the modern method of creating signal/slot connections:
connect (this, &MainWindow::sendData, dialogA, &MyDialog::getData, Qt::QueuedConnection);
If there's something wrong with the definition, using this format allows the compiler to catch it rather than a run-time warning. Assuming the parameters are defined correctly, there's nothing wrong with the "connect" statement except that it's in the wrong place, which is the second issue.
Every time the user clicks, an additional connection is being made between your main window and the dialog. Qt doesn't automatically ensure that only one connection is made between a given signal and slot. It'll create as many as you ask it for. The "connect" call should be part of the "if" block:
if (! dialogA)
{
dialogA =new MyDialog();
connect...
}
Depending on how much data is in that vector and what the dialog does with it, if you click enough times, it may be that you're just processing the data so many times that everything slows down tremendously.

Reliably showing a "please wait" dialog while doing a lengthy blocking operation in the main Qt event loop

I've got a Qt app that needs to call an expensive non-Qt function (e.g. to unzip a ~200MB zip file), and since I'm calling that function from the main/GUI thread, the Qt GUI freezes up until the operation completes (i.e. sometimes for 5-10 seconds).
I know that one way to avoid that problem would be to call the expensive function from a separate thread, but since there isn't much the user can do until the unzip completes anyway, that seems like overkill. I can't add processEvents() calls into the expensive function itself, since that function is part of a non-Qt-aware codebase and I don't want to add a Qt dependency to it.
The only thing I want to change, then, is to have a little "Please wait" type message appear during the time that the GUI is blocked, so that the user doesn't think that his mouse click was ignored.
I currently do that like this:
BusySplashWidget * splash = new BusySplashWidget("Please wait…", this);
splash->show();
qApp->processEvents(); // make sure that the splash is actually visible at this point?
ReadGiantZipFile(); // this can take a long time to return
delete splash;
This works 95% of the time, but occasionally the splash widget doesn't appear, or it appears only as a grey rectangle and the "Please wait" text is not visible.
My question is, is there some other call besides qApp->processEvents() that I should also do to guarantee that the splash widget becomes fully visible before the lengthy operation commences? (I suppose I could call qApp->processEvents() over and over again for 100mS, or something, to convince Qt that I'm really serious about this, but I'd like to avoid voodoo-based programming if possible ;))
In case it matters, here is how I implemented my BusySplashWidget constructor:
BusySplashWidget :: BusySplashWidget(const QString & t, QWidget * parent) : QSplashScreen(parent)
{
const int margin = 5;
QFontMetrics fm = fontMetrics();
QRect r(0,0,margin+fm.width(t)+margin, margin+fm.ascent()+fm.descent()+1+margin);
QPixmap pm(r.width(), r.height());
pm.fill(white);
// these braces ensure that ~QPainter() executes before setPixmap()
{
QPainter p(&pm);
p.setPen(black);
p.drawText(r, Qt::AlignCenter, t);
p.drawRect(QRect(0,0,r.width()-1,r.height()-1));
}
setPixmap(pm);
}
Moving to another thread is the correct way to go but for simple operations, there's a much less complicated way to accomplish this without the pain of managing threads.
BusySplashWidget splash("Please wait…", this);
QFutureWatcher<void> watcher;
connect(&watcher, SIGNAL(finished()), &splash, SLOT(quit()));
QFuture<void> future = QtConcurrent::run(ReadGiantZipFile);
watcher.setFuture(future);
splash.exec(); // use exec() instead of show() to open the dialog modally
See the documentation about the QtConcurrent framework for more information.

QThread and QML Locking Up

I have a class, audio_engine_interface, and in main.cpp, I add it to the QML thing.
viewer.rootContext()->setContextProperty("engine", engine);
In audio_engine_interface, I have a audio_engine class, which is computationally intensive—it needs to run on its own thread.
void audio_engine_interface::play()
{
QThread thread;
thread.start();
engine->moveToThread(&thread);
engine->play(); // Will use 100% of CPU
}
However, when I do this, the whole QML thread locks up, meaning I can't pause (pretty important). Am I missing something?
EDIT:
This thread won't mess up anything or access objects from other places. However, it does have a pause function that will need to be called at some point. For what it's worth, the engine is doing pitch shifting.
This is a problem: -
Qthread thread;
Creating a QThread object like this is creating it on the stack. When the function ends, the object will go out of scope and delete the QThread object.
You need to dynamically allocate the object on the heap: -
QThread* thread = new QThread;
Then remember to delete the thread, or set it to delete itself: -
//Qt 5 connect syntax
connect(thread, &QThread::finished, thread, &QThread::deleteLater);
You should also be aware of thread affinity (the thread which an object is running on). I suggest reading this article on how to use QThread properly.
You have so many problems.
when you move to thread your object must not have a parent
your thread object is local variable so it will day immediately when udio_engine_interface::play() end execution
you are invoking you engine->play(); method directly and this means that it will be executed in current thread.
moveToThread means that slots invked by signals connected using default 5th parameter (Qt::AutoConnection) will be queued in event loop of given thread.
The easiest way to fix it is use QtConcurrent:
void audio_engine_interface::play()
{
QtConcurrent::run(engine, &EngineClass::play);
}
Depending what your engine does you should make it thread safe (use mutex locks an so on), without details it is hard to tell, what exactly you should do.

QMainWindow stops receiving QEvent::UpdateRequest when user opens menu or resizes window

MyWindow which inherits from QMainWindow. MyWindow contains a QGLWidget that displays an animation.
The problem is that the animation pauses whenever I open a menu or resize the window.
The animation is implemented by calling QCoreApplication::postEvent(this, new QEvent(QEvent::UpdateRequest)) periodically, then calling redrawing each time the window receives the QEvent::UpdateRequest, like this:
bool MyWindow::event(QEvent *event)
{
qDebug() << event;
switch (event->type())
{
case QEvent::UpdateRequest:
render();
return true;
default:
return QMainWindow::event(event);
}
}
As seen from qDebug(), while a menu is open or the window is being resized, the window stops receiving update request events.
Is there a setting on QMainWindow/QWidget to make it continue to receive update request events? Or is there some better way to implement the animation?
Edit: I'm on Mac OS X.
This may be a Qt bug. I'll investigate.
Alas, you're way overcomplicating your code.
The postEvent should be simply replaced by this->update(). Behind the scenes it posts the event for you.
One can simply connect a QTimer instance's signal to widget, SLOT(update()). If you want to save on a QObject instance, use QBasicTimer and reimplement timerEvent as follows: void MyWidget::timerEvent(QTimerEvent* ev) { if (ev.timerId() == m_timer.timerId()) update(); }
There's no need to deal with event() reimplementation. Simply reimplement paintEvent() - that's what it's for.
Qt GUI updates are performing on MainThread. So slow gui response is reasonable, if you have many gui functionality does at same time. So generally, do not overload MaiThread with so many heavey function calls.
Probable solution to speed up your GUI response.
If PostEvent is called by your MainThread( if you are using timer from main gui thread ), instead move those to backend functionality in
a worker thread and postEvent once it has been done.
you call QCoreApplication::processEvents(), after your render(); function in MainThread.
This will help system to process all the other events that are in the event-loop before to continue
Please check, following link How to improve GUI response
Note: When creating and triggering the timer it will run within your thread by default, it wont start another thread.
Since I haven't heard any more from Kuba Ober about the possibility of this being a Qt bug, I went ahead and filed a bug report: https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-33382
I was able to partially work around the problem by calling the render() function more directly — that is, instead of sending an event, receiving the event, and having the event handler call the function. I accomplished this with a dispatch queue (but not the main dispatch queue, since that's tied to the default run loop so it has the same problem). However, working with the QGLWidget on multiple threads was difficult. After trying for a while to use the moveToThread() function to make this work, and considering other factors involved in the project, I decided to use something other than Qt to display this window.

Force update of QTListWidget to add/remove elements

I'm attempting to wrap a GUI around an existing management console app. The main function is to search for network devices, which is given a timeout and is essentially a blocking call until the timeout has expired (using sleep to do the blocking). In this example the call is this->Manager->Search(...).
My issue is that I want the QListWidget to display "Searching..." while the search is taking place, and then update with the results at the completion of the search. My on-click code for the Search button is as follows:
void ManagerGUI::on_searchButton_clicked()
{
ui->IPList->clear();
new QListWidgetItem(tr("Searching..."), ui->IPList);
ui->IPList->repaint();
this->Manager->Search(static_cast<unsigned int>(this->ui->searchTime->value()*1000.0));
ui->IPList->clear();
if(this->Manager->GetNumInList() != 0)
this->displayFoundInList(this->Manager->GetFoundList());
else
new QListWidgetItem(tr("No Eyes Found"), ui->IPList);
ui->IPList->repaint();
}
When I hit the button, the QListWidget IPList does not update until after the timeout has taken place (and I assume until after this callback has terminated). Does anyone have any suggestions? I was under the impression that calling ui->IPList->repaint() would cause an immediate redraw of the list.
Additional info:
QT Version 5.1.0 32-Bit
Compiled using VS2012
Running on Win7 Pro 64-bit (but to be ported to OSX and Linux, so nothing win-specific please)
1) You don't need to call repaint directly.
2) You should do your search asynchronously. It is big topic - you should learn basics of Qt first.
Start with signals and slots and then learn about QThread or QtConcurrent. Then implement a class that will do searching and send necessary signals: first signal on search start, second signal - on search stop. Then connect slots to this signals and work with your list view insine this slots.
Problem is that your "Search manager" blocks Qt's event loop. Thats why listview does not repainted.
You need a signal slot system because your search is blocking. Ideally you should do the search in a new thread. However you can cheat with a processEvents()
void ManagerGUI::on_searchButton_clicked()
{
ui->IPList->clear();
new QListWidgetItem(tr("Searching..."), ui->IPList);
emit signalStartSearch();
}
void ManageGUI::slotStartSearch()
{
// Process any outstanding events (such as repainting)
QCoreApplication::processEvents();
this->Manager->Search(static_cast<unsigned int>(this->ui->searchTime->value()*1000.0));
emit signalSearchCompleted();
}
void ManagerGUI::slotSeachCompleted()
{
ui->IPList->clear();
if(this->Manager->GetNumInList() != 0) {
ui->IPList->setUpdatesEnabled(false);
this->displayFoundInList(this->Manager->GetFoundList());
ui->IPList->setUpdatesEnabled(true);
} else {
new QListWidgetItem(tr("No Eyes Found"), ui->IPList);
}
}
Ideally you would want the Manager->Search to emit the signal and then use QtConcurrent::run to do the search in another thread.

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