What is the most effective way of creating "canvas" with high change frequency in Qt?
Currently I have a main application window (QWidget) where I create a QPixmap and set it to a QLabel:
QPixmap *canvas = new QPixmap(500, 500);
QLabel *area = new QLabel(this);
area->setPixmap(canvas);
The problem is that I have to call area->setPixmap(canvas); after every change I make on the pixmap so that it can be displayed (I'm counting there will be normally several changes every second). Is this way ok? Or is there a better/faster/more efficient solution?
PeterT and Jeremy both have good solutions. Which one is best depends on your needs.
If you are moving items around and changing them, use a QGraphicsScene to store the data you want to display and readily manipulate it. Use a QGraphicsView to display the result.
If you are already doing the rendering elsewhere as a QPixmap and just want to draw the result, subclassing QWidget and drawing it in the paintEvent using QPainter may be simpler. Remember to call update(), though!
Related
I am starting to use Qt and I am trying to do an application that uses mouseEvents on a picture QImage. Since I know that QImage is part of QPaintDevice and mouseEvents is part of QWidgets, I don't know how to use both on the same class or even if it would require me to make two independent widgets and overlap them on top of each other. I tried with pixmap, but it is not the best choice since I need pixel manipulation.
Evaluate mouse position/events in a QWidget. Draw the image on that QWidget either in a paintEvent or simply by placing QLabel with an image without margins/borders on that widget.
When the image is not scakled, you can calculate the pixel position having the mouse-position within the image.
I think the simplest way to start is to derive your widget from QLabel and overwrite required mouse events. The offset to the pixel is the contentsRect-position
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.
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.
I have a main window with some widgets on it, each needs its own graphic. I would like to use QPainter to draw shapes, lines, etc. on them, but only after a specific event, like the press of a button.
The problem is, if I just create a QPainter in any function, it won't work:
QPainter::setPen: Painter not active
The QPainter methods can only be called inside a paintEvent(QPaintEvent *) function! This raises the following problems:
I have to derive my custom classes for all the widgets I would like to paint on, so I can't use the Designer to place my widgets. This can get frustrating with a large number of widgets.
The widgets redraw themselves after each paint event of the window, like moving it around, or moving other windows in front of it. I do a lot of drawing in those widgets, so they will visibly blink in these cases.
Is there a better and simpler way to solve this? I started to think about just displaying images, and re-manufacturing those images only when the specific buttons are pressed. I doubt that it's the most elegant solution...
You can use custom widgets in the designer: Creating Custom Widgets for Qt Designer.
Qt Designer's plugin-based architecture allows user-defined and third party custom widgets to be edited just like you do with standard Qt widgets.
For your second question, one of the approaches is to create a QPixmap for each of your widgets. When your widget's appearance needs to be changed, you draw in that pixmap (using QPainter's constructor that takes a QPaintDevice - QPixmap is a QPaintDevice).
In your widget's paintEvent function, you simply fill your widget with that "cache" pixmap. This way, you only do the (potentially expensive) painting when it's actually necessary.
I'm creating some graphic data displaying widget in Qt4 and I was tempted to use the QGraphicsScene for it, create QGraphicsItems for the data items etc.
However, I wanted to add some layer of controls (eg. scrollbars, zoom+other buttons - I want to make it in a similar style as eg. Google Maps, that is, the data would be displayed all over the widget, and the buttons would be shown atop of them) to the widget. So I thought it might be feasible to add them to the scene (perhaps as a child of a QGraphicsGroupItem that would be shown over the data). But I want them to move & resize when I resize the whole widget, so I should use a QGraphicsLayout for managing them. But at this point, I discovered things are pretty complicated.
The problem is that when using QGraphicsLayout, the following constraints hold:
Only a QGraphicsWidget can be managed by a layout
QGraphicsLayout can only be used to manage children of a QGraphicsWidget
Which means that I would have to create my controls as QGraphicsWidgets, add a top level QGraphicsWidget to the data widget, and manage the size of this top level widget myself.
So I want to ask:
Wouldn't a classic approach (ie. use plain old widgets for all controls, and use QGraphicsScene only for displaying the data) be more reasonable?
Is there any advantage in using QGraphicsScene in this case (performance or simplicity...)?
How should I use QGraphicsScene to exploit its strengths?
Since Qt 4.4 you can embed classic widgets in a QGraphicsScene by using QGraphicsProxyWidget :
QWidget *widget = new QWidget;
QGraphicsScene scene;
QGraphicsProxyWidget *proxy = scene.addWidget(widget);
If you think that QGraphicsScene (or whatever other widget you have) is appropriate for most of your display, use that. What we have done in the past for somewhat similar things is to make a custom widget that inherits (one way or another) from QWidget, and put the control widgets in a layout on top of that widget. This means that the whole widget is drawing whatever it is you want drawn, and the control widgets are on top of that, resizing as the whole widget is resized.
Alternatively, a couple of times we've had layouts that were just a bit too complicated for the layout widgets to easily handle. Rather than create a custom layout, we just positioned them with no layout, and moved them in code on the resize event. It works just as well.