I want to create a slider which contain a different slider handle and i want to paint it according to slider handle position in the slider.
You could use QProxyStyle to ovrride drawComplexControl method - you will have to draw entire control on your own, as there is no separate flags in QStyle::ControlElement for parts of QSlider.
maybe you should look at this: http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/stylesheet-examples.html#customizing-qslider
If I understand you correctly, you want a slider that changes not only its position but also its appearance as you slide, right? For example, a mix of QDial and QSlider, ie. a slider with a turning knob.
If so, you will need to subclass either QSlider or QAbstractSlider (or QDial) and do the painting in your own paintEvent(). Note, however, that you will loose all style-awareness unless you care about that yourself (and that is an interesting topic in itself, see http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/style-reference.html for more info).
The Qt demos and examples, or the QSlider/QDial source code itself may serve as examples on how to overload a paintEvent().
Related
I was wondering how Qt does all its styling. I need to create a custom control and I'd like for it to meet the standards such that my control won't feel out of place on different platforms and styles.
For example, I'm going to need a cursor that's used in text, does Qt provide a method for drawing it? And how would I go about implementing it such that I don't redraw the entire widget for the blinking of the cursor?
What you typically do to create custom widgets is two-folded:
combine existing widgets
derive from existing widgets
That means, e.g., if you want to create a custom text input widget, use an existing one and only change the parts you need to change in overloads. Or maybe your customization does not need to change the text input part at all, but just plug it in at the right place. The widget I am talking about right now is QLineEdit. It is actually very basic and customizable.
There actually exist two methods (at least) on how to combine widgets to form your custom one. The first is to create a .ui file and use it in your custom class (or create widgets in code). The second one is to use a QGraphicsScene. There you can combine freehand painting (QPainter), with customly positioned objects and fully-fledged widgets.
If it is too hard to solve your problem by combining widgets and/or deriving from them, the last resort is always to take an existing widget with the desired functionality (e.g. QLineEdit that has a text-edit cursor) and read/copy the code (Note: license issues may arise).
To give a better answer to your question we would need more details on what exactly you want to achieve.
I'm having all sorts of size problems with Qt. I am creating my own widgets and using different layouts (generally, I need my own to make them work properly without spending hours on the "powerful" default layouts... which don't lay things out as intended.)
Once I'm done with a widget and its layout though, it doesn't work right. The size is never getting set properly unless I call widget->resize(1, 1); which finally forces a "resize" and makes the widget look correct (i.e. recompute the geometry.) Even the updateGeometry() call has no effect.
This is a dreadful problem when the resize() needs to be called on the parent widget (yuck!) and from what I'm reading should not be necessary were the layouts properly programmed.
Is there a sample that works and is not several thousand of lines long, or does Qt require several thousand lines to make anything work perfectly, even the simplest widget?
What are the minimal functions to be called to make a widget & its layout work at once?
Thank you.
Alexis
P.S. I tried to implement the sizeHint(), minimumSize(), maximumSize(), others that I'm missing? I was hoping that would be enough. Obviously, I also implement the setGeometry() on the layout to resize the children appropriately.
--- addition 1
There is a sample image with a layout that clearly isn't available as is in Qt. The positioning, functions, and colors of the different keys is XML driven and works for any keyboard in the world.
(note, this sample doesn't show the Enter key displayed on two rows and wider below than at the top; more or less, not doable at all with the regular layouts; of course, it works with my version.)
--- clarification
I'm not too sure how to describe the problem better. I was thinking to write a test widget next to see how I can reproduce the problem and then post that and eventually fix it. 8-)
The default layout function that the internal Qt layouts make use of require a lot of coding. I would like to avoid having to copy/paste all of that because for maintenance, it makes it close to impossible.
--- today's findings
As I needed to tweak one of the widgets, I decided to add a VBoxLayout and make it work.
I actually found the problem... One of the widgets in my tree is a QScrollArea and that sizeHint() returns (-1, -1). Not exactly what I'd expect but... whatever you put inside that widget has better know how to compute its width and height or else... it fails.
Looking at the code closely, I could actually compute the width by using the widest width found. Once I used that, the widget would appear (and it actually resizes itself as things change in the list, kinda cool.)
This being said, my earlier comment about having a tree of widgets that auto-resize themselves stands. From the root up to the parents of the leaves in your tree, all of those widgets will need a valid layout. Once I added one in the top widget it resized itself and its children properly (well... in my case up to the QScrollArea, the rest required a bottom to top resizing. Funny how that works!)
--- ah! ha! moment (or: what you find reading the implementation code!)
Today I bumped in another problem which just needed the correct call... I just couldn't find anything worth it in the documentation.
All the objects have a layout now, but a certain parent would not resize properly. Plain simple.
I had a call to the parent as following:
// changes to the children are changing the geometry
parentWidget()->updateGeometry();
Yeah. The docs says that's what you have to do. Nothing happens at all with that call. No idea what it's supposed to do, I did not look at that function. It never did anything for me anyway.
So... I looked at the layout to try to understand how it would send the info up/down. I did not see much except for one interesting comment:
// will trigger resize
This is said of the SetFixedSize mode. To reach that function you need to make the layout for update. Ah! Yes... the layout, not the parent widget... let's try that instead:
parentWidget()->layout()->update();
And voila! It resizes correctly in all cases I have. Quite incredible that the widget updateGeometry() doesn't trigger the same effect...
Although it's possible to do what you want it sounds like the problems you are having are because you're using Qt in a way that it's not meant to be used. Why do you need separate widgets for each key represented on the keyboard?
I see two options, both of which are better in some way:
Use QGraphicsScene and QGraphicsView.
A single custom widget that uses custom drawing to display the keyboard (and likely uses hover for hints).
The first option is probably better. Your keys could then be represented by QGraphicsSimpleTextItem's or even a QGraphicsSvgItem. It also provides a number of standard layouts or you could choose to write your own layout. By default you can use the keyPressEvent or mouseReleaseEvent to respond to user interactions.
I'd highly recommend you take a look at the QGraphicsView examples to get an idea what you can do.
If you go the second route you'll need to record the different key locations so you can respond accordingly as the user moves the mouse around, clicks, etc.
This won't help you with your immediate issue but I wanted to show you a keyboard I made using standard layouts and buttons. It's not perfect and it still won't help you with an enter key that spans two rows but it's not bad. It's resizable too by resizing the window, although I'm not sure if that will be apparent from the images below as SO may be scaling them. (you can view the actual images by opening them in their own tab)
Anyway, this was done using only Qt Designer with no manual coding. It consists of a top level vertical layout with 5 horizontal layouts in it. The buttons are then inserted into one of the 5 horizontal layouts. The size of the keys can be controlled by setting the horizontal and vertical size policies to "ignored" for most of the buttons and then horizontal "minimum" for buttons that you want to be wider. Things can be tweaked by setting min and max size restrictions to buttons. When resized, the buttons will not maintain their relative proportions though, that would probably take some custom programming.
The styling in your example could be approximated pretty well using css style sheets and background images. Still not a minor effort but you should be able to get most of the way there without custom layouts and buttons.
I've got a QWidget that contains several QLineEdits. When I tell the parent QWidget to change its background color
dynamically, I'd like the children (i.e. QLineEdits) to inherit this modification.
Is there an easy (read: one function call) to do this?
If nothing pops up, I think I'll just loop through the children of the QWidget, but when doing this properly I expect to end up with a recursive function with a lot of overhead, that's why I'm asking.
EDITs in Bold face.
Generally speaking you don't need to worry about "overhead" in dialogs. Unless you're doing some sort of massive draw operation, UI applications simply don't need a lot of optimizations. Digging down to all children and changing their background is a relatively fast operation compared to the Qt system itself actually doing the change.
That said, I'd assume there is a way to get what you want but I don't know what it is. My bet is that it will do exactly what you would anyway.
How are you going about telling it to "change color" btw? Qt doesn't seem to have operations to do that. You can assign a background role or change the pallete. As to the latter:
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7/qwidget.html#palette-prop
If you set the background color using a style sheet assigned to that widget and don't specify any selectors in the CSS, all child widgets will inherit any properties that apply to them.
I found it useful to use a selector that allowed me to target specific widgets for a certain style.
QWidget[objectName|="special_color"]
{
color: rgb(255, 255, 255);
}
If I used this in a style sheet assigned to a container widget, it would apply the specified color to any child widgets whose name started with "special_color" like "special_colorEditBox1" no matter how they are nested or contained.
I have a custom Qt widget which I used to display disassembly and I am looking to add syntax coloring to it.
Currently, I simply set the QPen to a solid color, construct the text I want to display, and render it to the QPainter at the appropriate coordinates.
The question is, what is the best approach to adding syntax coloring? I've thought of a few:
I could simply divide the coloring into logical blocks, each preceded by setting the QPen to the desired color.
I could have special escape characters which represent a change in the color palette, and render 1 character at a time.
I could do a modification of #1 and create a list of std::pair<QColor, QString>, then I could simply iterate the list setting the color and drawing the text as I pop items off the front of the list.
Something entirely different?
I know that each of the 3 approaches I've listed will technically work, but I'm looking for a very efficient solution. This code will be called a lot. And since this is an interactive debugger, if this code is slow, someone rapidly stepping or tracing will see a visible slowdown.
EDIT: I'm aware of QSyntaxHighlighter and QTextDocument. The main issue is that these don't generally suite my purposes very well. I have several columns which all have dividers and can be slid back and forth. To give you an idea, Here's a link to a screenshot of my debugger. As you can see it isn't really like a text document at all. In fact it is closer to a list or table. But there is already a bunch of custom drawing going on making a normal QTextDocument somewhat impractical.
EDIT: I was incorrect, It seems that QTextDocument can render directly to a QPainter. Looks like what I need!
EDIT: It is unclear how to control where and how QTextDocument or QTextLayout will draw on a QPainter. I've attempted to use them to no avail. So if someone could provide a rudimentary example, that would be very helpful.
EDIT: I was eventually able to get what I wanted using something like this:
painter.setPen(default_color);
QTextDocument doc;
doc.setDefaultFont(font());
doc.setDocumentMargin(0);
doc.setPlainText(text);
highlighter_->setDocument(&doc);
painter.save();
painter.translate(x, y);
QAbstractTextDocumentLayout::PaintContext context;
context.palette.setColor(QPalette::Text, painter.pen().color());
doc.draw(&painter, context);
painter.restore();
Qt provides a QSyntaxHighlighter that is probably exactly what you want. QSyntaxHighlighter uses a QTextDocument to mark each block of code with a specific state which can be associated with a specific presentation format.
The documentation on QSyntaxHighlighter provides a sample demonstrating how this may be accomplished and does some nice things:
Separates the model from presentation
Separates the formatting into different reusable classes (if implemented as such)
Supports the State design pattern if useful to your language
I'd use either QTextEdit or directlay its underlining engine QTextDocument.
I'm trying to find a simple way to change the colour of the text and background in listview and treeview controls in WTL or plain Win32 code.
I really don't want to have to implement full owner drawing for these controls, simply change the colours used.
I want to make sure that the images are still drawn with proper transparency.
Any suggestions?
Have a look at the following macros:
ListView_SetBkColor
ListView_SetTextColor
TreeView_SetBkColor
TreeView_SetTextColor
There are also appropriate methods of the CListViewCtrl and CTreeViewCtrl wrapper classes:
GetBkColor
SetBkColor
You may also want to take a look at WTL's CCustomDraw::OnItemPrePaint (that's if you need to control the drawing of individual items)
A good article that describes this process is here
It's been a while since I've use the win32 API directly, but I believe that if you handle the WM_ERASEBACKGROUND message for your control, you can use FillRect() in your handler to paint the background using whatever color you like.