How to enable mouse popup in QtCharts? - c++

I need a small popup be shown when the mouse hovers over series in my QtChart.
Highcharts (Javascript) has some really nice examples like this one:
How can I implement this QtCharts?
I cannot find any documentation on implementing popups.

As far as I know you will have to do it by yourself. I needed exactly the same and used a simple QWidget embedded in a QGraphicsProxyWidget that I added to the QGraphicsScene of the chart view.
QWidget *popup = new MyPopUpWidget;
QChartView v;
QGraphicsProxyWidget *proxy = v.scene()->addWidget(popup);
// if you want a drop shadow you can use QGraphicsDropShadowEffect
QGraphicsDropShadowEffect* shadow = new QGraphicsDropShadowEffect();
shadow->setOffset(0, 4);
shadow->setBlurRadius(8);
proxy->setGraphicsEffect(shadow);
While this is nice and simple, the positioning of the popup is the actual work. All the simple solutions weren't good enough for me. For example there are signals if your mouse hits a QGraphicsItem (all line items of your charts are QGraphicsItems) but they are usually to small and you only want to react on the actual data points, not on the line segments.
You can override your mouseMove(QMouseMoveEvent *) function and always check your mouse position against all data points and adjust your popup (show/hide, positioning). If you have many points that will be slow, so I used a spatial grid and assigned data points to grid cells initially. Then you only need to check against points within the grid cells around your mouse position.
I didn't find a better solution.

Related

Drag an errorbar around in a plot in qt

I am using QPainter in Qt 5.9 using C++ to make a plot and update it based on mouse events.
I would like to know how to plot an error bar that is something like this:
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Of course the gaps shouldn't be there between the vertical and horizontal lines.
I need to be able to drag the error bar around on the plot and obtain the co-ordiantes of the center position of the error bar when the mouse button is released. So far I have made a plot with axes and labels. Not sure how to get the error bar using QPainter or any other Qt lib class.
Please provide some insight on how make/plot the error bars. Is there a simple way to do that in QPainter ?
If you are using QPainter you should implement drag-n-drop yourself. It's not that difficult if you don't have too many objects on your plot.
Here's the basic idea:
First of all render all objects. Than you need to reimplement mousePressEvent and mouseMoveEvent in your plot widget. In mousePressEvent you should check if you've clicked on the draggable object and define this object as currently being dragged. In mouseMoveEvent just move this object (if there is one) by changing its coordinates and rerender plot.
You will probably want to optimize plotting to avoid full plot rerender at each mouse move tick. This can be achieved by plotting rarely changing objects to QPixmap/QImage, than rendering this QPixmap/QImage on widget and than plotting error bars and all other kinds of objects that could change at each mouse move tick over this pixmap. At each repaint you will need to define if you need to replot just error bars (or some other dynamic objects) or all widget. I personally implement this by defining bool needFullRepaint which is set to false by widget after each render tick and is set to true after some data inside widget changed.
This is kinda low-level approach, it will require high level of skill and some time to be spend but you will be awarded with maximum control of the rendering and interactions with the widget, which is not always possible with the QGraphicsScene or QCharts
It's going to be a fairly involved project for someone who hasn't used Qt before.
You will want to use QGraphicsScene in all likelihood, rather than a QPainter example. QGraphicsScenes are way easier than QPainter for interactive examples.
Use QCharts as a starting point, they have examples for how to plot data and then move items as a result. Check out the callout example, in particular, which has you paint a callout labeling the position of the cursor on the graph.
Look at the "Drag and Drop Robot" example from Qt.
All of these are an excellent starting point for how to implement draggable features to create an interactive plot. Qt makes it easy for a generalized sense: however, for many plotting features (at least until QtCharts), Qt was much more difficult than specialized plotting libraries.

How can I create a QPushButton with a custom (triangular) shape in Qt 5.5?

How can I create a triangular pushbutton in Qt? What is the most simplest way of executing this? I use the designer to create buttons and not code.
Also, I read somewhere that shapes may be changed as long as the frame of the button is still rectangular but I want the frame to adjust according to the shape as well. How can I achieve this?
More detail: I want to place lots of small triangular buttons next to each other with every other triangle flipped. Each triangle button has it's own function, etc (no overlapping borders accepted). Can anyone give me a descriptive explanation for how I might go about this?
The geometry on a QWidget is always a rectangle.
It would be possible to create a QPushButton derivative, override its paintevent and do some nasty painting considering its neighborhood etc. but it would be really a pain...
it is much easier to use a QGraphicsView, QGraphicsScene and add appropriate QGraphicsItem (maybe the QGraphicsPolygonItem?), add them and use their signals/slots or create a derived class for your purposes.
It is not that hard to override the mouseevents to recognize clicks and you can even use the QStyleSheets to let the "button" look like it gets pressed.

Placing QWidgets at specified coordinates?

Context: I'm making Risk (the popular board game) in C++/Qt, and I've run into a problem. I decided to make the map interactive by placing buttons on every country, which could then be clicked on. After some experimenting, I've subclassed QGraphicsPixmapItem for the buttons, and stuck them inside a QGraphicsScene and a QGraphicsView. I've made the world map a background image via CSS, so that buttons could be overlaid without much hassle.
My problem: I want to place those buttons at specific coordinates. (If it matters, those coordinates would be absolute.) All of the interfaces that I've made so far, I've done in code - I'm not familiar with the Qt Designer, so I'm looking for a function or set of functions that'd let me place my buttons (more or less) where I want them.
What I've tried: I looked in the documentation, but couldn't find a function that let me control where items were placed, just ones that organized items in various ways - columns, horizontal boxes, vertical boxes, etc.
When I designed QWidgets before, I'd done so by placing buttons, other widgets, etc. in QLayouts, but there don't seem to be layouts that allow me the control I'd like. The only one I can see that'd do something similar, is QGridLayout, and experiments with that so far haven't worked the way I wanted them to - the buttons don't get anywhere near the edges of the map, no matter how many columns or rows I add.
The easiest solution would be giving up and placing the buttons beside the map, of course, but that's a last-ditch solution.
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: Added example source code, for clarity.
QHBoxLayout* layout = new QHBoxLayout;
TerritoryButton* test = new TerritoryButton(QPixmap("img.png"));
TerritoryButton* test2 = new TerritoryButton(QPixmap("img.png"));
QGraphicsScene* scene = new QGraphicsScene;
QGraphicsScene* scene2 = new QGraphicsScene;
scene->addItem(test);
scene2->addItem(test2);
QGraphicsView* view = new QGraphicsView(scene);
QGraphicsView* view2 = new QGraphicsView(scene2);
layout->addWidget(view);
layout->addWidget(view2);
setLayout(layout);
setFixedSize(1000, 512);
QGraphicsPixmapItem inherits QGraphicsItem, so you can call setPos(x, y) (after inserting the pixmap item into the scene with addItem).
void QGraphicsItem::setPos(const QPointF &pos)
Sets the position of the item to pos, which is in parent coordinates. For
items with no parent, pos is in scene coordinates.
The position of the item describes its origin (local coordinate (0, 0)) in parent coordinates.

How to resize QWidget in a layout while aligning it to the center and maintaining aspect ratio

Ok, so I'd like to display an image with qt where the image resizes with the browser and maintains the aspect ratio while also remaining centered in the window. I can get the resizing with aspect ratio to work correctly, but when I align it with Qt::AlignCenter, the qwidget no longer resizes (remains a fixed size). So basically, I can get either option to work but not together.
A good example of what I'm trying to do would be the imshow() function in matlab. This resizes the image while maintaining the aspect ratio and also centering the image in the window. The code I have is soemthing like this:
void roilayout::resizeEvent(QResizeEvent *event)
{
QSize p(roiview->refimage->size());
p.scale(roiview->view->size(), Qt::KeepAspectRatio);
roiview->view->resize(p);
}
and in the constructor:
roiview = new roiwindow;
roiview->view->setViewportUpdateMode(QGraphicsView::FullViewportUpdate);
roiview->view->setCursor(Qt::CrossCursor);
roiview->view->setHorizontalScrollBarPolicy(Qt::ScrollBarAlwaysOff);
roiview->view->setVerticalScrollBarPolicy(Qt::ScrollBarAlwaysOff);
QHBoxLayout *layoutContainer = new QHBoxLayout;
layoutContainer->addWidget(roiview->view);
setLayout(layoutContainer);
I searched google and couldnt find anything. Also asked a similar question a little while back but from the answers it appears I didn't ask the question clearly enough. Thanks.
A couple of things: First it would be helpful to know what type of control "view" is.
Also, I don't think you should need to resize the child control "view" (whatever type it is) within the parent's resizeEvent() callback.
A better solution might be to set the sizeHint policy on the child widget to automatically expand.

qt - widget - positioning

I want to place some widgets in a parent widget in some random places, like one button at Point (10,10) and another at (15,40), etc. How to achieve this?. QGridLayout is pushing everything into row column style. But I want to put the widgets whereever I want,Can anybody help me?
If you really want to set absolute positions, I would ignore using a layout altogether. You can manually set the positions of elements by using the move() function or the setGeometry() function.
QWidget *parent = new QWidget();
parent->resize(400, 400);
QPushButton *buttonA = new QPushButton(parent);
buttonA->setText("First Button");
buttonA->move(10, 10);
QPushButton *buttonB = new QPushButton(parent);
buttonB->setText("Second Button");
buttonB->move(15, 40);
Side note: I would avoid setting absolute positions of elements in Qt. Why? Well, Qt tries to be a platform-independent GUI library. On different platforms, a lot of display things can change (i.e. font size of text in push buttons) so the size of your actual push buttons can vary to accommodate large or smaller font sizes. This can throw off your meticulously spaced push buttons is you use absolute positions as in the example above.
If you use layouts, overlapping buttons or buttons falling off the edge of your window can be avoided.
You can see my answer for overlay button in QT: Qt Widget Overlays. This may help you to achieve what you want.