I have a model that retrieves data from a table in a database from a certain SQL query, and shows the items in a QTreeView. The characteristics are:
the data comes from a table, but has an underlying tree structure (some rows are parents that have rows below them as children)
this tree structure is shown in the QTreeView
the children are selectable in the QTreeView (not so the parents)
the table in the database gets updated continuously
in the updates, a children can be added to any existing parent
periodically (with a QTimer) the QTreeView is updated with the contents of the table
Since the children are added at any time to any parent, the first silly approach when updating the QTreeView is clearing it all, and append all the rows again, in form of parent or children, to the QTreeView. This is a 0-order approximation, and it is indeed terrible inefficient. In particular, the following problems appear:
Any existing selection is gone
Any expanded parent showing its children is collapsed (unless ExpandAll is active)
The view is reset to show the very first row.
What is the best solution to this problem? I mean, the first solution I will try will be not to clear the QTreeView, but instead parse all the returned rows from the table, and check for each of them whether the corresponding item in the QTreeView exists, and add it if not. But I wonder if there is a trickiest solution to engage a given table in a database with a QTreeView (I know this exists for a QTableView, but then the tree structure is gone).
This thread mentions a general approach, but this might get tricky quickly, but I am not sure how this would work if the underlying model is changing constantly (i.e. the QModelIndex becoming invalid).
Worst case is that you will have to write your own mechanism to remember the selection before updating and then re-applying it.
I assume you use some model/view implementation? You could enhance your model with a safe selection handling, in case the example mentioned above does not work for you.
I guess this is the case for a self-answer.
As I presumed, after a careful analysis of what data is retrieved from the database, I had to do the following "upgrades" to the retrieval code:
I retrieve, along with the fields I want to show in the view, two identifiers, one for grouping rows and one for sorting items into groups
I also retrieve the internal record ID (an increasing integer number) from the table in the database, in order to ask only for new records in the next retrieval.
In the model population code, I added the following:
I first scan the initial records that may belong to existing groups in the model
When, in the scanning, I reach the last group in the model, this implies that the rest of retrieved records belong to new groups (remember the records are retrieved sorted such that items that belong to the same group are retrieved together)
Then start creating groups and adding items to each group, until we use all the records retrieved.
Finally, it is very important:
the use beginInsertRows() and endInsertRows() before and after inserting new items in the model
capture the sorting status of the view (with sortIndicatorSection() and sortIndicatorOrder()) and re-apply this sorting status after updating the model (with sortByColumn())
Doing that the current position and selection in the QTreeView receiving the model updates are preserved, and the items in the view are added and the view updated transparently for the user.
Related
In Django, I would like to have an ordered many-to-many-relation. Assume I have, say, the models OrderedList and Item, and I want to be able to insert Item()s into an OrderedList() at a specific index, I want to be able to retrieve the Item()s of an OrderedList() in their order and also to change the order of Item()s on an OrderedList
I already found Define an order for ManyToManyField with django and https://github.com/gregmuellegger/django-sortedm2m
Both the github repo and the accepted answer in the SO question are working with the same architecture: They create an additional integer field, say order_index, on the junction ("Through") table which represents the position of the Item() on the OrderedList().
Honestly, I do not like that too much. If I see this correctly, having the order stored on the junction table can create inefficiency when I want to reorder Item()s: Imagine, I want to change the position of an Item() on an OrderedList() which has n Item()s. This means O(n) database updates to reorganize the order indices.
I would like to avoid this. I think of an architecture where I have an ordinary many-to-many-relation and one additional column on the OrderedList table which holds a list of Item ids, say items_order. In this architecture, I need one database update and one list operation on items_order - which should be way faster, I guess.
I believe the best way for this is to create a custom model Field. The docs state how to create a custom model Field (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/howto/custom-model-fields/) and I can create my items_order field like this. But I did not find how to make a custom Field which, besides creating the order_list, also creates the junction table and takes care of updating the items_order whenever a new related Item() is added or removed from the relation. I think, I should subclass the ManyToMany Field (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/_modules/django/db/models/fields/related/#ManyToManyField). But I don't know how to do this, so could you give me some guidance here?
After updating the model data of my derived class of a QAbstractItemModel, I do not want the listeners (assume a QTreeView) to completely update all of the tree representation, but only the data in an individual column of most of the rows.
Example: I want to only update the second column of my items, so I thought I had to emit dataChanged(createIndex(0,1,&root), createIndex(rowCount(),1,&root);
However, this still updates the complete tree for some reason - is that expected behaviour? Does it have to do with the underlying model organisation (which works very similar to Qt's own simple tree example)? Or does it have yet other reasons I did not consider?
I have a little problem I am trying to figure out, I am working on a QT app that is using the QTreeView and I have a bunch of categories which have children, so they look like
Parent 1
Parent 2
- Child 1
- Child 2
Parent 3
and so on and so forth, so in my database I have rows which have all the regular details (name, id, date created, etc) and the ones which are children have their parent specified (so pid=parent row id). I then loop over then using the standard QSqlQuery stuff. But the problem I am running into is this...
Items are added to the treeview by QStandardItem* item = new QStandardItem(icon, name); and then appending the row model->appendRow(item); but my children need to call parentitem->appendRow(item); so the QStandardItem* item of the parent. But how can I find out what that is without storing every single item?
Moral of the story is, is there a way to do one of the following that won't destroy performance.
Store the QStandardItem* item in an array that I could reference the parent in the childs loop?
Assign an ID or something to QStandardItem* item which I could then reference when adding a child.
Generate a TreeView model from an array, where the children array elements get added as children?
Something else I haven't thought of...
I can't seem to find any good examples of QTreeView with children from a database.
All you need is a QMap<int, QStandardItem*> rowItemMap. When you retrieve a row from the database with a given row id, you immediately create an item and add it to the map. You then add it to a parent that you look up in the map. You'll need to create a dummy parent as the root item. There's nothing wrong with storing pointers to items. For reasonable amounts of items, it won't matter. If you think of storing more than 10k items, you may want to think of using a view that offers transitive closure up to a certain depth of the tree. It'd then be much easier to map such a view, via QSqlTableModel, directly onto the tree, without having to copy the entire tree from the database into a temporary model.
I have created my own class that derives from QTableView, the associated model is is derived from QAbstractTableModel. The data in the model is performance data(process name, mem usage etc.) which continuously gets updated with a short interval.
Updating the model is done by first removing all data (enclosed with a beginRemoveRows/endRemoveRows) and then "readding" the slightly changed data as a batch operation (enclosed with beginInsertRows/endInsertRows).
How do I disable the vertical autoscrolling to the top whenever I clear/readd?
Working solution
The scrollbar movement was due to signalling removing of all data using beginRemoveRows/endRemoveRows. In order to avoid this I instead emitted a dataChanged(...) signal with the start/stop indexes of the updated list of items if it was smaller than the existing model, and with indexes from the existing model if the updated list was bigger. I also used a begin/endRemoveRows if the updated list was smaller and a begin/endInsertRows if the updated list was bigger.
Greetings,
I've been writing some nasty code to support the undo/redo of deletion of an arbitrary set of objects from my model. I feel like I'm going about this correctly, as all the other mutators (adding/copy-pasting) are subsets of this functionality.
The code is nastier than it needs to me, mostly because the only way to mutate the model involves calling beginInsertRows/beginRemoveRows and removing the rows in a range (just doing 1 row at a time, no need to optimize "neighbors" into a single call yet)
The problem with beginInsertRows/beginRemoveRows is that removal of a row could affect another QModelIndex (say, one cached in a list). For instance:
ParentObj
->ChildObj1
->ChildObj2
->ChildObj3
Say I select ChildObj1 and ChildObj3 and delete them, if I remove ChildObj1 first I've changed ChildObj3's QModelIndex (row is now different). Similar issues occur if I delete a parent object (but I've fixed this by "pruning" children from the list of objects).
Here are the ways I've thought of working around this interface limitation, but I thought I'd ask for a better one before forging ahead:
Move "backwards", assuming a provided list of QModelIndices is orderered from top to bottom just go from bottom up. This really requires sorting to be reliable, and the sort would probably be something naive and slow (maybe there's a smart way of sorting a collection of QModelIndexes? Or does QItemSelectionModel provide good (ordered) lists?)
Update other QModelIndeces each time an object is removed/added (can't think of a non-naive solution, search the list, get new QModelIndeces where needed)
Since updating the actual data is easy, just update the data and rebuild the model. This seems grotesque, and I can imagine it getting quite slow with large sets of data.
Those are the ideas I've got currently. I'm working on option 1 right now.
Regards,
Dan O
Think of beginRemoveRows/endRemoveRows, etc. as methods to ask the QAbstractItemModel base class to fix up your persistent model indexes for you instead of just a way of updating views, and try not to confuse the QAbstractItemModel base class in its work on those indexes. Check out http://labs.trolltech.com/page/Projects/Itemview/Modeltest to exercise your model and see if you are keeping the QAbstractItemModel base class happy.
Where QPersistentModelIndex does not help is if you want to keep your undo/redo data outside of the model. I built a model that is heavily edited, and I did not want to try keeping everything in the model. I store the undo/redo data on the undo stack. The problem is that if you edit a column, storing the persistent index of that column on the undo stack, and then delete the row holding that column, the column's persistent index becomes invalid.
What I do is keep both a persistent model index, and a "historical" regular QModelIndex. When it's time to undo/redo, I check if the persistent index has become invalid. If it has, I pass the historical QModelIndex to a special method of my model to ask it to recreate the index, based on the row, column, and internalPointer. Since all of my edits are on the undo stack, by the time I've backed up to that column edit on the undo stack, the row is sure to be there in the model. I keep enough state in the internalPointer to recreate the original index.
I would consider using a "all-data" model and a filter proxy model with the data model. Data would only be added to the all-data model, and never removed. That way, you could store your undo/redo information with references to that model. (May I suggest QPersistentModelIndex?). Your data model could also track what should be shown, somehow. The filter model would then only return information for the items that should be shown at a given time.