I've recently been studying Qt, and have the following questions:
What is the difference between QAction and QToolButton?
How do I know when to override QPushButton? For example, should I override in order to be informed when the mouse enters a QPushButton's bounds? I don't need to in order to get the signal click().
Question 1:
QActions are used to define tasks performed by an application in a way which can be understood by a number of different user interface objects. Using an example from the Qt docs for context:
A QAction is defined; it is given an icon image, a text description, a keyboard shortcut and a longer tooltip description, as well as being linked to a user defined function.
newAct = new QAction(QIcon(":/images/new.png"), tr("&New"), this);
newAct->setShortcuts(QKeySequence::New);
newAct->setStatusTip(tr("Create a new file"));
connect(newAct, SIGNAL(triggered()), this, SLOT(newFile()));
Later in the implementation, the QAction is added both to a textual menu bar...
fileMenu->addAction(newAct);
... and an icon-based tool bar:
fileToolBar->addAction(newAct);
The menu bar uses the text description to create an entry in the menu corresponding to the action. Similarly the toolbar uses the icon set on the QAction to create an icon in the toolbar which corresponds to the action. Selecting the menu item, clicking the toolbar icon or pressing the keyboard shortcut will all result in the same effect: that defined by the linking of QAction::triggered() to newFile().
So to directly answer your question: a QAction is an abstract way of defining the various parameters and behaviour of a particular task performed by the application. A QToolbarButton is a UI object (derived from QWidget) created by a QToolbar in response to QToolbar::addAction()
Question 2:
Yes, QPushButton has a clicked() signal inherited from QAbstractButton, but it does indeed lack a way to inform when the mouse has entered its bounds. You have a couple of options in order achieve this, but first you need to first set the mouseTracking property to be enabled. This will allow you to receive mouse move events on the QPushButton even if no mouse buttons are pressed. With that done you need to explore one of the following options:
As you suggest, you could subclass QPushButton and reimplement mousePressEvent in order to respond to the mouse position.
You could install another widget as an eventFilter on the QPushButton, and watch for events of type (QEvent::MouseMove).
Related
There is a "entered" signal for a QTreeView Widget, which I can use to check if my mouse moves over an item.
Is there a way to implement an "left" signal?
Why:
I have a treeView with a lot of items which I also plot via QChart. I want to highlight the plot when someone mouse over the data in the treeview.
I can highlight it via the "entered" signal, but I have no idea how to change it back to the default if the mouse left/mouse is over another item...
entered is a member of QAbstractItemView. You should probably reimplement QAbstractItemView::dragLeaveEvent virtual method.
See this method documentation: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qabstractitemview.html#dragLeaveEvent
I'm very new to Qt, and I need to simulate a click using the QTest Namespace and QTest::mouseClick. My problem is I would like to click a QMenu entry, defined as a QAction, but the mouseClick function doesn't allow me to pass this as an argument (only QWidgets or QWindows).
What could I do here?
You may use another way such direct triggers of your QAction's as far as you have them:
qAction->trigger();
This should have the same impact as mouse clicks in testing purposes.
A QAction doesn't have any UI itself, so it can't be clicked.
It can, however, be plugged into several UI components, e.g. in a QMenu or a QToolBar, which can be clicked.
So if your tests needs to simulate some user interaction, you simulate it with the UI portion created for the action, e.g. the respective tool button on the toolbar, or entry in a menu
I have my custom widget inherited from QWidget, and I've connected the widget's menu-calling signal to my slot.
connect(m_ontologyView, SIGNAL(customContextMenuRequested(QPoint)), SLOT(showContextMenuSlot(QPoint)));
Now I want user to be able to change button calling the context menu. Normally it's called with right mouse button, but how do I tell the widget to call the menu with a button of my choice?
I'm on Qt 5.4.0
Instead of using QWidget::customContextMenuRequested, you will need to reimplement the widgets mouse event functions, QWidget::mousePressEvent, QWidget::mouseReleaseEvent and QWidget::mouseMoveEvent. Inside of these events, you can then show you menu using QMenu::popup. (The point can be extracted from the mouse events).
I got a QGraphicsScene that contains QGraphicsItems. On clicking such an item I open a dialog. I now want the item to be displayed in an area of the dialog.
I tried a QGraphicsView (in the dialog) and "pointed" it to the item which works allmost perfectly. The problem is, that it is possible to click the item in the dialog which would open a new dialog.
So my question: is there a easy way to tell QGraphicsView to ignore any input events? If not, is there a easy way to display a QGraphicsItem within a widget?
I am feeling so stupid...
QGraphicsView::setInteractive(false) did the trick.
I am still able to move the icon with the mouse wheel but this can probably be avoided by restricting the scene rect with setSceneRect()
You can install an event filter, on the QGraphicsView, which ignores input events. The Qt documentation states:
In your reimplementation of this function, if you want to filter the event out, i.e. stop it being handled further, return true; otherwise return false.
I'm working on a custom Qt button that allows you to edit the text on the button if you double click it. When the button is double clicked, a QLineEdit appears where the text on the button is allowing the user to edit the text on the button. My requirement is that if the user clicks anywhere in the application window, the QLineEdit should disappear and cancel the edit operation. This works in some cases. Specifically, it works if I click on anything that is capable of text entry. Other portions of the window don't work as expected. I'll click on a blank portion of the application window, and the QLineEdit retains its focus. How can I remove its focus in these cases?
I've found a solution that seems to work, though I'm still open to other options if there are any. I'm using PyQt4, so my example is in python:
Create a subclass of QLineEdit just so I have a new type. I don't want or need this behavior on all QLineEdit instances; just these specific ones.
class MyLineEdit(QtGui.QLineEdit):
pass
Now, in my QMainWindow subclass, I override the mousePressEvent() implementation. It gets the currently focused widget. If that widget is of type MyLineEdit, clear the focus.
class MyMainWindow(QtGui.QMainWindow):
def ...
def mousePressEvent(self, event):
focused_widget = QtGui.QApplication.focusWidget()
if isinstance(focused_widget, MyLineEdit):
focused_widget.clearFocus()
QtGui.QMainWindow.mousePressEvent(self, event)
def ...
This gets me the behavior I'm looking for so that if the user clicks anywhere on the application's window, the focus is cleared.
Edit: I did find one caveat to this. I have a QTreeView in the main window. If the user clicks on the tree view, focus is not removed from the text edit field.
Catch the clicked() signal of your parent widget and call yourLabel->clearFocus() (that unfortunatelly happens to not be a slot, making things more complicated) there.
I followed Grant Limberg instruction here but figured out that, in my case, a simple:
QApplication.focusWidget().clearFocus()
would fix the problem.
I'm not sure if this also works in Qt4 (I'm using PyQt5) but you can change the FocusPolicy of the QMainWindow or parent widget to clear the focus in the QLineEdit. As per https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qwidget.html#focusPolicy-prop
I've changed the policy of my QMainWindow to Qt.StrongFocus and it worked like the functionality described in the question.
If done in C++ I would do something along the lines of:
connect(myWidgets->MyLineEdit, SIGNAL(returnPressed()), this, SLOT(onLineEditDone());
void onLineEditDone()
{
myWidgets->MyLineEdit->clearFocus();
}
For this particular case I would use editingFinished() instead of returnPressed(), probably, but I would NOT use textChanged(QString).