Qt Connect Parent Slot
last modified July 16, 2020
Signals and slots are loosely coupled: A class which emits a signal neither knows nor cares which slots receive the signal. Qt's signals and slots mechanism ensures that if you connect a signal to a slot, the slot will be called with the signal's parameters at the right time. Signals and slots can take any number of arguments of any type.
In this part of the Qt5 C++ programming tutorial we talk about events and signals.
Events are an important part in any GUI program. All GUI applications are event-driven. An application reacts to different event types which are generated during its life. Events are generated mainly by the user of an application. But they can be generated by other means as well, e.g. Internet connection, window manager, or a timer. In the event model, there are three participants:
- event source
- event object
- event target
- I summarize it, is there some way, connect to the SLOT definition, method of reality (and the template can not be used) must be, what, SLOT only is available and, then, is a single, C / C + + is possible if there is knowledge. Here, Qt QSignalMapper try using the class.
- Explicitly calling a Python slot from QML. If the Python object is exposed to QML using setContextProperty, you can call any slot of the object explicitly from QML, as shown in qmltopy1. First, you define a class in Python, inheriting from QObject: class Console(QtCore.QObject): @QtCore.Slot(str) def outputStr(self, s): print s.
The event source is the object whose state changes. It generates Events. The event object (Event) encapsulates the state changes in the event source.The event target is the object that wants to be notified. Event source object delegates the task of handling an event to the event target.
When we call the application's exec()
method, the applicationenters the main loop. The main loop fetches events and sends them to the objects. Qt has a unique signal and slot mechanism. This signal and slot mechanism is an extension to the C++ programming language.
Signals and slots are used for communication between objects. A signal is emitted when a particular event occurs. A slot is a normal C++ method;it is called when a signal connected to it is emitted.
Click
The first example shows a very simple event handling example. We have one push button. By clicking on the push button, we terminate the application.
This is the header file.
We display a QPushButton
on the window.
The connect()
method connects a signal to the slot. When we click on the Quit button, the clicked
signal is generated. The qApp
is a global pointer to the application object. It is defined in the <QApplication>
header file. The quit()
method is called when the clicked signal is emitted.
This is the main file.
KeyPress
In the following example, we react to a key press.
This is the keypress.h
header file.
The application terminates if we press the Escape key.
One of the ways of working with events in Qt5 is to reimplement an event handler. The QKeyEvent
is an event object, which holds information about what has happened. In our case, we use the event object to determine which key was actually pressed.
This is the main file.
QMoveEvent
The QMoveEvent
class contains event parameters for move events.Move events are sent to widgets that have been moved.
This is the move.h
header file.
In our code programming example, we react to a move event. We determine the current x, y coordinates of the upper left corner of the client area of the window and set those values to the title of the window.
We use the QMoveEvent
object to determine the x
, y
values.
We convert the integer values to strings.
The setWindowTitle()
method sets the text to the title of the window.
This is the main file.
Disconnecting a signal
A signal can be disconnected from the slot. The next example shows how we can accomplish this.
In the header file, we have declared two slots. The slots
is not a C++ keyword, it is a Qt5 extension. These extensions are handled by the preprocessor, before the code is compiled. When we use signals and slots in our classes, we must provide a Q_OBJECT
macro at the beginning of the class definition. Otherwise, the preprocessor would complain.
Qt Connect Signal Parent Slot
In our example, we have a button and a check box. The check box connects and disconnects a slot from the buttons clicked signal. This example must be executed from the command line.
Here we connect signals to our user defined slots.
If we click on the Click button, we send the 'Button clicked' text to the terminal window.
Qt Connect Parent Slot Machine
Inside the onCheck()
slot, we connect or disconnect the onClick()
slot from the Click button, depending on the received state.
This is the main file.
Timer
A timer is used to implement single shot or repetitive tasks. A good example where we use a timer is a clock; each second we must update our label displaying the current time.
This is the header file.
In our example, we display a current local time on the window.
To display a time, we use a label widget.
Here we determine the current local time. We set it to the label widget.
We start the timer. Every 1000 ms a timer event is generated.
To work with timer events, we must reimplement the timerEvent()
method.
This is the main file.
This chapter was dedicated to events and signals in Qt5.