The documentation for QWidget::winId states (among other things) "If a widget is non-native (alien) and winId is invoked on it, that widget will be provided a native handle."
I'm not sure what 'alien' means in that context, but I'm choosing to ignore it for now. :)
So assuming that my widget now has a valid native handle associated with it, can I then pass that native handle to another process and into QWidget::find and get a valid QWidget object back within that second process?
I probably don't need to do too much else to the widget in the second process other than show/hide it and attach it to a parent widget. (It is guaranteed to not be attached to any parent widgets in the first process and never visible in the context of the first process).
If all the above works:
How much control will the second process have over that widget?
Will the first process receive user input events as if it were attached
to the first process's UI, and will the first process be able to update the widget as normal?
James
Let's take a look at Qt sources.
QWidget *QWidget::find(WId id)
{
return QWidgetPrivate::mapper ? QWidgetPrivate::mapper->value(id, 0) : 0;
}
find() can find a widget only if mapper contains it. The mapper is a static QHash<WId, QWidget *> variable. Items are inserted in this hash only in the QWidgetPrivate::setWinId method.
So, if a widget with a WId was created in another process, you can't find it using QWidget::find. This function doesn't use any native OS functions to find widgets.
Also see general description of alien widgets in Qt documentation:
Introduced in Qt 4.4, alien widgets are widgets unknown to the
windowing system. They do not have a native window handle associated
with them. This feature significantly speeds up widget painting,
resizing, and removes flicker.
Related
I'm developping a Qt application in which the user can add QML objects inside a QGraphicsScene. The available QML objects are listed and the user can add as many as he wants.
Until now, I used QQuickWidgets. The QGraphicsScene contains a top-level widget which is the parent of all the QQuickWidgets I create. It works fine, but I have a performance problem. With a high number of objects, the application starts to slow down, and takes too much space in RAM (more than 1.5 GB with the first example I created, containing 400 objects).
I thought it comes from the way QQuickWidgets are handled by Qt, and wanted to try another way, with QQuickViews. To do so I created a root view, converted in a QWidget so I can embed it in my view, which is a QWidget. Then I add a new QQuickView in the root view for each created object.
The creation of the root view, its container and the engine:
_rootView = new QQuickWindow();
_rootView->resize(1024, 720);
_rootView->show();
QWidget *container = QWidget::createWindowContainer(_rootView, this);
container->resize(_rootView->size());
container->setObjectName("TopLevelQmlViewWidget");
_layout->addWidget(container);
_engine = new QQmlEngine(_rootView);
The creation of the QQuickViews representing the objects:
QQuickView *view = new QQuickView(_engine, _rootView);
view->setSource(url);
view->setResizeMode(QQuickView::SizeViewToRootObject);
view->show();
It works, but the problem is that each QQuickView creates its own thread, which doesn't change the way I handle it but takes place in memory. I don't understand why, because I reparent them to the root view.
So my questions are the following :
1 - Is there a way to prevent the QQuickViews to create their own threads ?
2 - Is using QQuickViews, indeed, less memory-consuming than using QQuickWidgets ?
3 - If no, how can I handle adding a big number of QML objects in a QWidget view without consuming too much memory ?
I think using multiple QQuickViews is a bad idea. An application usually only needs one. I would take a look at QQmlComponent instead. Here is an example:
QQmlComponent component(_engine, QUrl::fromLocalFile("MyItem.qml"));
QQuickItem *childItem = qobject_cast<QQuickItem*>(component.create());
childItem->setParentItem(_rootView);
I'm by no means a QML expert. However, here are some pointers I can think of
Avoid mixing and matching QQuick: widget/View.
Consider creating objects dynamically
You can also make use of Loaders, but they have a small amount of extra overhead.
Consider using something like a stack/swipe view to minimize amount of loaded objects.
For best ROI, I'd first try implementing something like stack view and see how much it may help with the RAM. Then go on to create other objects dynamically as needed.
Finally I think QT has a tool that lets you see during runtime the amount of memory of the QML tree. You can look at that and see where your biggest memory hogs are.
I have an application with many windows (QWidgets).
I didn't save a list of open windows, though, so everytime I want to close a window, I have to retrieve it.
Particularly, each of these windows is called here SubWindow.
Every SubWindow class contains a layout with a MultiEditor *sEditors, which has a menu with an action that closes the current window.
Every SubWindow is created within the MainWindow.
I have two plans.
1) destroying the SubWindow from within itself, by adding in the SubWindow constructor
connect(sEditors, SIGNAL(closeWindow()),
this, closeWindow()));
or
2) destroying the SubWindow from within the MainWindow class, by adding in the SubWindow constructor
connect(sEditors, SIGNAL(closeWindow()),
main, SLOT(closeWindow(this)));
About 1), I don't understand how I can close and destroy a QWidget from within itself (delete this; didn't seem to work, but I can try again).
About 2) my SLOT(closeWindow(this)) doesn't seem to be triggered, so I am wondering if I can pass "this" as an argument.
Ad 1) You can use QObject::deleteLater(). This will destroy the object in the next event loop cycle, and is specifically create for situations like this
Ad 2) You cannot pass actual arguments as parameters in signal-slot connections.
You can however find out who has emitted the signal by using the sender() function in the slot. In your case, that would be the sEditors object.
Other options:
3) You can use a QSignalMapper to map signals from your editors to the Subwindows.
4) (Using Qt5 / C++11) You can use a lambda connection in your Subwindows:
connect(sEditors, SIGNAL(closeWindow()), [this] () {this->closeWindow();});
Can I pass this to a Qt slot?
A slot is a non-static method, so it already has access to this. The this you refer to is the third argument to QObject::connect. In Qt 4 syntax, you're free to omit the third argument - it defaults to this. In Qt 5 syntax, you must be explicit about it, though.
I don't understand how I can close and destroy a QWidget from within itself
To delete any QObject from within itself, use QObject::deleteLater(). Recall that a QWidget is-a QObject in terms of LSP.
my SLOT(closeWindow(this)) doesn't seem to be triggered
There's no such slot (give us a link to its documentation: you can't), and your slot signature is also invalid because the only things within the parentheses in the slot signature can be types, and this is not a type: SLOT(slotName(TYPE_LIST_HERE)), e.g. SLOT(mySlot(int,QString)).
To close a widget, use its close() slot:
connect(sEditors, SIGNAL(closeWindow()), this, SLOT(close());
Yet, by using Qt 4 connect syntax, you're leaving coding mistakes to be detected at runtime - and then if you don't pay attention to the debug output at runtime, you'll miss it. It's thus much better to use the new (Qt 5) connect syntax, and let the compiler detect errors for you:
connect(sEditors, &MultiEditor::closeWindow, this, &QWidget::close);
Alas, there's no need to tightly couple the object that sends closeWindow to SubWindow - at least not within the SubWindow::SubWindow(). Instead, you can connect at the place where you create the editor.
To delete a widget when it gets closed, simply set the Qt::WA_DeleteOnClose attribute on it and let Qt do it for you. No need to explicitly call deleteLater etc.
You might factor all of it into a factory method:
template <class T> T* SubWindow::makeEditor() {
auto sub = new T{this};
sub->setAttribute(Qt::WA_DeleteOnClose);
connect(sEditor, &MultiEditor::closeWindow, sub, &QWidget::close);
return sub;
}
MainWindow::MainWindow(/*...*/) : /*...*/ {
makeEditor<EditorType1>();
makeEditor<EditorType2>();
/*...*/
}
I am subclassing QFileDialog to try to get some custom behavior. I would like to connect to signals emitted by components of the dialog, e.g. the textEdited signal when the file name line edit is manually edited. I understand that QFileDialog emits some signals itself, but these do not cover the cases I would like to respond to.
I have two ways about this I can think of, but don't know how to implement. One is to somehow attain a reference to the component to connect to it's signal. The other would be something with event filters, but the event source is the dialog itself, so I don't know how to determine where mouse clicks or key presses occur.
Are either of these methods feasible? Or another way?
Here is one option (your first suggestion):
dialog = QFileDialog()
layout = dialog.layout()
# for i in range(layout.rowCount()):
# for j in range(layout.columnCount()):
# try:
# print i,j
# print layout.itemAtPosition(i,j).widget()
# except:
# pass
line_edit = layout.itemAtPosition(2,1).widget()
line_edit.setText('Hello Stack Overflow')
dialog.exec_()
This gives you access to the QLineEdit in the dialog, which has a bunch of signals you can connect to.
I've also included the code I used to find this widget. I just iterated over the widgets in the layout of the dialog and found the indices of the one I was after. So if you need access to anything else in the dialog, you should be able to find it pretty easily!
Downside to this method: If the layout changes in a future version of Qt, this will break. I suppose you could make the algorithm more robust by looking for widgets that are instances of QLineEdit, but there are always risks with hacky approaches like this!
I have 2 classes: one maintains some loop (at leas for 2-3 minutes; and is inherited from QObject) and another shows up a progress dialog (inherited from QDialog).
I want to start the loop as soon as the dialog is shown. My first solution was:
int DialogClass::exec()
{
QTimer::singleShot(0, LoopClassPointer, SLOT(start()));
return __super::exec();
}
There is a problem with throwing exceptions from slots. so I considered a possibility to make public slot start() just a public function. But now I don't know how to make it works well. Things like this:
int DialogClass::exec()
{
LoopClassPointer->start();
QApplication::processEvents();
return __super::exec();
}
don't help. The dialog doesn't appears.
Is there a common approach to this kind of situations?
some details, according to questions:
I have to work with system with its own styles, so we have a common approach in creating any dialogs: to inherit them from stytle class, which is inherited from QDialog.
my 'LoopClassPointer' is an exported class from separate dll (there is no UI support in it).
I have a 'start' button in main app, which connected with a slot, which creates progress dialog and 'LoopClassPointer'. at the moment I send 'LoopClassPointer' instance in the dialog and don't whant to make significant changes in the architecture.
Take a look at QtDemo->Concurrent Programming->Run function
e.g. in Qt 4.8: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qtconcurrent-runfunction.html
In this situation, I recommend you separate the logic of the loop from the dialog. Gui elements should always be kept separate.
It's great that your worker class is derived from QObject because that means you can start it running on a separate thread: -
QThread* m_pWorkerThread = new QThread;
Worker* m_pWorkerObject = new Worker; // assuming this object runs the loop mentioned
// Qt 5 connect syntax
connect(m_pWorkerThread, &QThread::started, m_pWorkerObject, &WorkerObject::start);
connect(m_pWorkerThread, &QThread::finished, m_pWorkerThread, &QThread::deleteThis);
m_pWorkerObject->moveToThread(m_pWorkerThread);
m_pWorkerThread->start();
If you're not familiar with using QThread, then start by reading this.
The only other thing you require is to periodically send signals from your worker object with progress of its work and connect that to a slot in the dialog, which updates its display of the progress.
I have a feeling this isn't possible with the current API, but I have to ask. Is it possible to query a particular QObject's signal or slot name (from the metaObject) and retrieve all the QObjects and their slot or signals names that are connected to it?
I'm doing this because, in effect, I have a large number of layouts that contain an identical arrangement of widgets, for each layout there an object and each of the layout's widgets control the various properties of it. I want to keep one layout, and connect it's widgets' signal/slots to all the other objects in the same pattern, but in order to do this I need to 'record' all the signal-slot data.
Is it possible?
There is an interesting file in Qt - %Qtdir%/src/corelib/kernel/qobject_p.h, it contains class QObjectPrivate, used by Qt internally.
Use
static QObjectPrivate *get(QObject *o) function to get QObjectPrivate member for your widgets, and try to call its interesting members like
QObjectList receiverList(const char *signal) const; or QObjectList senderList() const;. File is totally undocumented, but it seems to contain exactly what you need...