Qt - How to handle memory management for dialogs? - c++

Question

I am running into the following issue:
Users presses "Ctrl+N" which goes into function MainWindow::newAction()
In MainWindow::newAction(), create a QDialog dlg(centralWidget()) and call dlg.exec()
While dlg is open, users pressed "Ctrl+N" again
The result is that dlg never gets deleted (it will only get deleted once centralWidget() gets deleted).
The call stack is something like this:
MainWindow::newAction ()
...
MainWindow::newAction()
I am wondering how to handle this case. I want all of the local dialog variables from the first call to newAction() to be deleted by the time we go into the function newAction() again.

Answer 1

You also can try something like this:
void MainWindow::newAction() {
const auto dialog = new MyDialog(centralWidget());
// When user will close the dialog it will clear itself from memory
connect(dialog, &QDialog::finished, [dialog]() {
dialog->deleteLater();
});
dialog->exec();
}
However, a good move would be to stop user from summoning more QDialogs than a single one, given that this one is a modal dialog(might be a good idea to keep this dialog pointer as a class member and check is it on screen already before calling exec() on it.

Answer 2

If i understood the question right, you want one dialog to be opened and want to delete it before a new dialog request comes in?
If that's the case you can do following:
In MainWindow.h declare QDialog *dlg = nullptr
In your MainWindow.cpp newAction() function you can do following:
void newAction()
{
if(dlg != nullptr)
{
dlg->close();
dlg->deleteLater();
//or
//dlg->destroy(); // this will immediately free memory
}
dlg = new QDialog(centralWidget());
...
//dlg->exec(); // This will automatically make QDialog modal.
dlg->show(); // This will not make a QDialog modal.
}
I hope this will help. Remember QDialogs when displayed with exec() they automatically behave as Modal window. show() will make it non-modal.