Back to General and Gameplay Programming

Understanding Qt At a Deeper Level

Vincent_M · 2014-08-05T01:55:32

I started diving into Qt again last night, and a few things made me wonder how it works. For example: when the UI is designed in the Designer View, is the .ui file (an XML schema) compiled into a header/source file that contains all of the controls as if instantiated in-code? The reason I ask is because the .ui file's corresponding header/source pair's class is also prototyped in the scope of the UI namespace. Then, a data member is created from that, called "ui" within the class itself. That ui data member appears to contain a pointer for each QWidget added in the Designer. For example, if I drag a QPushButton into the Designer, and name it as pushButton in its Properties Inspector, the ui member will have a ui->pushButton member pointer within it of type QPushButton. Funny thing is, I couldn't find where the "pushButton" member was declared in-code. This leads me to think that Qt Creator's Intellisense is smart enough to parse the XML file, and a class being changed behind the scenes, or at least at compile time. Then, there are, signals and slots. It sounds like they have some sort of special definition that's triggered by the Q_WIDGET macro. Also, QWidget::connect()'s 2nd and 4th parameters are of type const char*, and it's common practice to use the SIGNAL() and SLOT() macros to pass through prototypes of functions (not methods because they don't appear to be associated with any class). I understand that that I'm calling two functions that these widgets seem to have, but how does that work under-the-hood, exactly? Does Qt rely on some special C++ compiler, or special rules?

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by Vincent_M July 31, 2014 04:56 PM

9 comments, last by Servant of the Lord 9 years, 8 months ago

Servant of the Lord

33,739

August 05, 2014 01:55 AM

Qt has implemented a properties system of it's own. Not sure how they compare to C#'s. I'm decently competent at Qt - I'm sure a few people here are. Could you explain your problem in more details? We might be able to come up with a solution.

In my own code, I have my main window, and the main window has multiple tabs. Each tab has a blank QWidget in it, that I, using QtDesigner, have 'Promoted' to the custom widgets for those pages. Inside QtDesigner, one of the blank widgets is 'Promoted' to my custom AreaEditingPage widget.

In my AreaEditingPage, which also happens to be designed using QtDesigner as a different .ui file (but doesn't have to be), I have a sidepanel on the left with tabs and things like that. I can place custom widgets directly in QtDesigner and promote them using QtDesigner's promotion feature.

[rollup=Dissecting my own Qt application]

[/rollup]

Understanding Qt At a Deeper Level

This topic is closed to new replies.

Popular Topics

Recommended Tutorials

Understanding Qt At a Deeper Level

This topic is closed to new replies.

Popular Topics

Recommended Tutorials

Reticulating splines