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.
Related
My main application window is constructed as follows:
A QVBoxLayout;
In its upper cell there is a horizontal QSplitter;
In its lower cell there is a QFrame with QHBoxLayout.
Now, when I add widgets to either QSplitter or QHBoxLayout and there is no room left in them, they both stretch themselves indefinitely (and go offscreen if they can) instead of shrinking the widgets they contain. For the QHBoxLayout part, I tried combining setSizeConstraint(QLayout::SetMaximumSize) with various ways of setting QFrame's width, to no avail. It still stretches uncontrollably. For the QSplitter part, I don't even know what to begin with.
So, what is the magic (and apparently undocumented - I spent 2 hours googling) API call combo for making Qt widget containers shrink their children instead of growing themselves?
I am working on a hide/show feature for my console in my Qt GUI application. The console consists of 2 widgets; QLabel and QTextEdit. Do I need to add the QLabel and QTextEdit to a QWidget in order to show/hide them, or is there a better way?
So basically I am looking for a container such as 'JPanel' in Java...
Do I need to add the QLabel and QTextEdit to a QWidget in order to show/hide them, or is there a better way?
Multiple methods are possible here. You can, as you suggest, create a parent QWidget and add the QLabel and QTextEdit to a QWidget. Calling show and hide on the parent widget will affect its children.
Another method would be to have a slot function, which when an action is called, the slot calls show / hide on the 2 widgets.
Neither is right or wrong and depends upon the overall design of your application.
Ok, I think you need to use a layout (horizontal / vertical):
The simplest way to arrange objects on a form is to place them in a
horizontal or vertical layout. Horizontal layouts ensure that the
widgets within are aligned horizontally; vertical layouts ensure that
they are aligned vertically.
Horizontal and vertical layouts can be combined and nested to any
depth. However, if you need more control over the placement of
objects, consider using the grid layout.
I have the following code in the ctor of my main window widget, in my Qt App. No matter how I align the buttons added to the QGridLayout, they always stay in the upper left corner, on top of each other.
Can anybody tell me what I've done wrong, I can't find it.
btn_File= new QPushButton("&File", this);
btn_Close = new QPushButton("&Close", this);
btn_File->setAutoFillBackground(true);
btn_Close->setAutoFillBackground(true);
QGridLayout * layout = new QGridLayout(this);
layout->setContentsMargins(20,20,10,10);
layout->setSpacing(5);
layout->addWidget(btn_File,2,2, Qt::AlignRight);
layout->addWidget(btn_Close,1,1);
this->setLayout(layout);
EDIT: It seems that only the btn_Close is being drawn. I just tried to add a QComboBox to the grid, and it doesn't show up.
The problem was that my main window was derived from QMainWindow, in which you need to add a CentralWidget before adding GUI elements. I changed my main window to derive from QWidget instead, and now it works.
tried calling this->adjustSize() at the end?
qt layouts really suck!
alignment on qgridlayout depends on the size of the objects, how many cols an object needs, and the size of the biggest object inserted.. so it is very difficult to put objects as you want...
i suggest to use setGeometry or move instead!
I am having a problem redrawing a QWidget window after its size has been adjusted. I have tried update(), repaint(), adjustSize(), but all seem to suffer from the same thing: only part of the window is redrawn, resulting in the window frame on the bottom and right sides to not show. The window is also not resized entirely.
Just in case it makes a difference, the window is in a QMdiArea.
Thanks.
// ... some subwidget resizing and moving.
calibrationWindowUIs[activeWindow].layoutWidget2->move(QPoint(oldXLeft, 30 + height + 21));
calibrationWindowUIs[activeWindow].layoutWidget1->move(QPoint(oldXRight, 30 + height + 21));
// Set window size.
calibrationWindows[activeWindow]->setMinimumSize(calibrationWindowUIs[activeWindow].tabWidget->geometry().width() + 40, calibrationWindowUIs[activeWindow].tabWidget->geometry().height() + 40);
calibrationWindows[activeWindow]->update();
Note: I'm new to Qt; perhaps I'm doing something wrong with layouts?
Edit: I may have not given enough information. Alright, to be quite honest, I still have to delve deeper into layouts and related material. What I had tried to do here was to use Qt Designer in order to design the window. I've done what perhaps amounts to a stupid mistake: I didn't use an overall parent layout for the entire window, but hacked it with a couple of smaller layouts that I therefore have to move about and resize individually. See the Qt Designer screen (the red rectangles are the sole layouts): .
What is happening is that in the frame to the right, I am playing a video clip that can be of various resolutions. I want the frame to resize depending on this resolution, which also means that the buttons and window have to move/resize accordingly. That is where the window resize comes in. I'm sure there is a more elegant solution than what I am doing here, but I am trying to handle several other scenarios here and hence the lack of quality of code.
The result is that when I load a clip, the window attempts to resize, but does so badly; the following is the result:
If the window is dragged, it 'pops' into its correct size; in the meantime, however, it just looks ugly.
A couple further questions: do you use the Qt Designer to design your UIs? I found that programmatically you can achieve much better control of your interfaces. One thing which I could not do in the designer was to have a layout parented by the main widget, i.e. the equivalent of having the following bit of code:
QVBoxLayout* layout = new QVBoxLayout;
this->setLayout(layout);
A layout placed in the designer always seems to create this 'layoutWidget' subwidget, which the layout you placed is then parented to. Any way around that?
We use a mix of designer and code to create layouts, the Qt layout system can be very unintuitive at times. But I would probably not layout a full series of tabs in one designer ui file, i would make each tab each own widget and then assemble them either through code or in the designer by promoting to custom classes. This gives you better separation of responsibilities, by putting all the functionality of all the tabs into one file you almost guarantee a large unwieldy class.
When a widget has child widgets in designer you can assign a layout to it by adding it from the context menu. Make sure nothing is selected and click on the background of the widget in which you want to create a layout, select the layout and all of the widgets children will be assigned the layout.
What does help is creating hierarchies of layouts. Looking at your first screenshot, i would probably use a vertical layout with spacers on top and bottom for the items on the right, an horizontal layout with spacers left and right for the button bar and a grid layout for all the items together. Without the spacers your items will extend when the window grows. The spacers will let you control the behavior under resizing better.
you are calling setMinimumSize(). That's fine, but you should also call resize()
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.