QTreeView scroll to current row after sort - c++

I'm adapting QT Creator Basic Sort/Filter Model Example to work with my own source data (my movie library). That link shows what the example display looks like, and here's a link to the relatively small amount of source code. I don't really understand everything I'm doing, but mostly things have gone well until I hit this current problem...
How can I update the view so currently-selected row ALWAYS stays visible after changing sort order?
I hope someone will tell me exactly what C++ code needs to added / modified in the actual example program. There's probably no point in posting links to QT documentation, or "similar" code doing much the same thing in other contexts, because I don't think I'll be able to understand how to adapt such information to my own needs.
I'm using latest QT Creator 6.0.2 running under latest Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon, but I'm not sure that makes any difference, and I don't know what if any other information might be relevant.
EDIT:
I assume the extra code to force "scroll to current selection after sort" logically fits in QT Creator source code file examples/ widgets/ itemviews/ basicsortfiltermodel/ window.cpp
I commented out line 122 in that file (suppress display of the "source" table, because I only want the "proxy" view). Other than that, the source file in my derived project is identical to the original as held here on GitHub (along with the header & main source for the example project, per my second link above).
Effectively, I'm asking for the smallest possible change to the actual example project code to ensure the currently selected line never disappears from view after sorting.
The exact example from QT documentation has less than a dozen rows of data, so exact control of display positioning doesn't matter much. But I'll normally have a lot of rows visible, and the currently selected row could appear at any position within the visible window. Sometimes, "current row" might not actually be visible before a sort, but I'd like it to always be visible after.
It might be asking a lot, but I'd be seriously impressed if anyone comes up with succinct code to ensure that wherever possible, the currently highlighted row stays in position (doesn't jump up or down) while the rows above and/or below change as a result of sorting.

If you want to scroll to current row after sorting, then I would suggest doing the following four changes to your code.
You should implemented your own model by inheriting from QStandardItemModel and in this derived model class:
add a signal sorted() to your model class
override virtual method sort() (https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qabstractitemmodel.html#sort)
void YourModel::sort(int column, Qt::SortOrder order = Qt::AscendingOrder) override
{
QStadardItemModel::sort(column, order);
emit sorted(); // this is the signal you added
}
Then create a method which will access the tree view and would do this:
void scrollAfterSort()
{
treeView->scrollTo(treeView->currentIndex());
}
Connect YourModel::sorted() signal to this scrollAfterSort() method.

Related

WXWidgets TextCtrl or RichTextCtrl

I'm using wxWidgets for a log window of a piece of software which runs for many hours. The log can accumulate 10,000's of entries. Does the community have a suggestion for how not to have the GUI thread choke for many seconds when updating a textctrl or richtextctrl with this many lines? I'm open to using either control type but richtext is preferable to I can highlight warnings or errors.
It's currently set to readonly, so undo, redo, paste, etc are not active. I'm currently freezing and thawing it before and after adding content.
In a test case, I add 10000 lines to the text control with a freeze and thaw before and after. This operation still takes over a minute. Are these text controls simply incapable of handling long content?
Assuming your display is like a log, where each "line" is it's own entry, try using the wxListCtrl in "virtual mode". Basically, you maintain the data in your own control (a vector, array, whatever works) and the control asks you for only the data that is currently visible.
Inherit wxListCtrl with your own class and implement OnGetItem. When a row is visible, your derived control will have this method called for each row (and each column if you implement multiple columns) and you provide it with the data for that row, accessed directly from your array (list, vector, whatever).
More information is available in the wxWidgets docs here: http://docs.wxwidgets.org/3.0/classwx_list_ctrl.html#a92370967f97215e6068326645ee76624
The suggestion to use wxListCtrl in #avariant answer is a good one, however a wxTextCtrl with wxTE_RICH style should still be capable of appending 10000 lines in well less than a minute if you freeze/thaw it before/after. I'd be curious to know if you can reproduce the problem in the text sample included with wxWidgets (which already has a menu item doing something like this) and, if so, which wxWidgets port do you use.

Qt Views [not] updating upon underlying structure of the model changes

I have encountered an issue that is most likely WAD but I still need to solve. I originally thought it was a problem with my custom models but it is in fact present with Qt native model classes as well.
Consider this little program: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9MLVHQaeHKxeFBSYzVGVF9sQ0U/edit?usp=sharing
It is just fresh Qt GUI app with 2 QTreeViews and two sets of buttons for inserting/removing rows and columns on each view. The underlying models are QStandardItemModel in one view and QIdentityProxyModel in the other. The navigation is accomplished by clicking on the models – the index is stored and then used by the buttons.
Try inserting/removing rows and columns and you will notice that the views do not update right after the underlying data structure will have changed. Rather they will be updated after you hover over them. And that is the problem because in my other project I have incoming network data that updates the model data that is being displayed to user via standard Qt views. Therefore I need the views to be updated after the data changed and NOT when user hovers over them which he may not do as he may not be aware of the change.
You may notice there is the updateViews() function where I have tried to force-update the views. Neither update() nor repaint() changed anything. The former probably correctly as the documentation says but the repaint should as I understand it cause the widgets to get repainted… Is there any other way to force-update the views?
Also, the reason why I set up the proxy model is that in my project the proxies are heavily used and therefore I need to cause the view-update via them rather than via external slot/function call as is the case in the example given. But if need be this could work as a work-around as well.
Thanks!
EDIT: Problem is manifesting with columns manipulation only it seems. See detail in comments below.

Howto determine the first and last row qt model/view

I'm building an filebrowser based upon the QAbstractListModel and QListView.
As you know what is displayed can change, by making the window bigger, or by scrolling.
How can I determine the first and the last entry (or index) actually displayed. Do I have to program that myself?
Added later:
see for full description:
http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/26497/
Thanks in advance,
Stef Bon
Voorburg
the Netherlands
The reason provided in the comments is not adequate; the model is supposed to call beginInsertRows/endInsertRows at any time, even if the range where you are inserting items is not currently visible in the view. There are multiple reasons for that (proxy models, QPersistentModelIndex instances, selection handling, QAbstractItemView's internal housekeeping, caching of already rendered items etc).
The MVC API in Qt is designed so that the model is not supposed to know about what the view is currently showing. The contracts expressed in the QAbstractItemModel specify that the model "just" has to keep the rest of the world updated by calling the protected methods (which emit the rowsInserted etc signals, among other things). If you ever find yourself in a situation where you start thinking "hey, if only I knew how this model was displayed in the attached view", the correct thing is to make sure you are using the existing API effectively. As an example, a very common problem is that the programmer finds out that their model's data() method is called too often, for each item in a list, for example. The typical reason for this is that the corresponding QListView needs to know how much space to reserve for each item so that the scrollbar size can be determined. A correct way for this is to either return usable data for the SizeHintRole, or set the view's uniformRowSizes to true.

How do I write a WYSIWYG editor?

I would like to program a WYSIWYG editor for HTML. I'm looking for a high level approach, which I will eventually be implementing in C++.
My initial approach is to create a hierarchy of classes which extend a common base class (node). So object "body" would contain object "p" which would contain object "b" which would contain some text.
class node {
node *parent;
vector<node> children;
string name;
map<string,string> attributes;
string text;
virtual void render(const rect &rect, const point &offset) = 0;
virtual void onEvent(const event &e);
}
The main engine would call something like body.render(screen, point(0, 0)), which would recursively render its children.
The cursor would be represented by a pointer into the object hierarchy, and each node would have its own internal cursor state, and would respond to keyboard events when it is the selected node.
For example, if the user hits the left-arrow, and the "p" node is selected, the "p" node's reaction to the keypress might be to change the current node to the parent of "p".
Abstractly, it seems like this could work, the closest thing I can find to what I'm looking for is Sigil, which at first glance seems pretty intimidating to study (main.cpp is 70k).
Before I go down this road, I was wondering if anyone had a simpler approach, or can see any pitfalls with this method.
A simpler approach, if you can do this, is to embed a web browser in your application and set contentEditable="true" on <body>. If you're on Windows, you can use the built-in one, or you can embed an engine like Gecko or WebKit.
You can look at doing color picking.
Basically you render everything twice. Once is what is displayed to the user.
The other is a bunch of bounding boxes done in unique random colours that you can turn back into pointers via a hashtable lookup or whatever. This allows you to quickly locate what is under a mouse cursor without having to recursively look up every object. You might want to miss the currently selecvted object from the color picking that way you can click twice to get the object below you current one (if you want to keep going for lower you will need to mess around with zorder depth somehow. Maybe don't render anything in the selected elements bounding box region that is over the zorder of your currently selected object).
Finally once you have selected the specific element you can enter a sub editing mode. For example turning a block of text into an editable text box with a blinking cursor, drawing borders/handles around your element to allow you to resize/manipulate it and showing a list of properties.
Realistically if your looking at making a HTML WYSIWYG editor, that will also require a HTML rendering engine. Unless you plan to make your own from scratch (which is a massive undertaking by itself), or only plan on implementing a very limited subset of HTML (which would still be fairly time-consuming). Most HTML renderer engines will include some kind of support for tapping into things like object picking. It might be worth grabbing webkit and seeing what it supports. Maybe look at the Chromium source code (Chrome includes an inbuilt webpage inspector that isn't too far off being an editor (it allows object picking and runtime editing of properties but the editing isn't totally WYSIWYG since its done in an external window, but that might be enough for what you want.
You might even do better to look at writing you editor (or parts of it) as some kind of JavaScript/Grease Monkey extension that you can load over the page being edited. You could write your whole editor in HTML or just add some support handle wrapper script that communicates to your native program.

Making a game in Qt regarding GUI windows

I've been wanting to program a simple game with a simple GUI using Qt (Its will be a VERY simple game, nothing fancy). What I've been wondering is, how can I create multiple windows and display them when needed? For an example, a battle screen and an inventory screen. The user should only see one of them, but should be able to access the other one when needed. I was using stacked widget but I'm not sure if that's the proper way. Also, is it better to design the windows in the designer or to code them?
A StackWidget certainly would accomplish what you want to do. The reason why it is not always used for this kind of thing, is that it all the screens are pre-created at the beginning and always exist. This means it takes a little longer to initialize, and you are using more resources than you need at any one time
But as you are saying, if this is a simple game, then I don't see a big problem with it. Just as easily, you could also, create an empty layout and swap the inventory and game panels as needed.
Add my vote to everyone else suggesting to use the designer. It is so much easier to manipulate layouts, actions, and such using the designer then through code.
You can see the Designer manual here
So this is what I would suggest:
Create your "battleScreen.ui" - which is the designer file for your battle screen and everything in it, and then create your "inventory.ui". Both of these could be QWidgets, or QFrames, or whatever makes sense.
Then create your "Game.ui" which will be your QMainWindow.
In your Game main window, you can then add your QStackWidget, and place your inventory, and battle screens in the stack widget.
If you don't know how to do that...
1) drag a QWidget into your form (into the stack widget)
2) select the new QWidget and right-click.
3) Select "Promote to..."
4) Fill out the information to promote the QWidget to your inventory class
Promoted Class Name: The name of your inventory class
Header File: The header file of your inventory class
5) Click add
6) Click Promote.
Hope that helps.
Since I'm not sure what your goals are I can't advise whether or not the stacked widget is appropriate but I think you can accomplish quite a lot using the designer and style sheets. If you need to code some parts of the GUI, you can always drop in a place holder widget and either replace it with coded items or make them children of the place holders.
A general answer for a general question:
Use the Designer to create your windows; hide and show the auxiliary windows as needed.
Use a flow manager class to manage the visibility of a related set of windows.
The stacked widget is useful for managing a button/icon whose appearance changes based on state; the different representations live in the stack.