[Development] QML Singletons

[Knoll Lars]

On Dec 11, 2012, at 4:55 AM, Alan Alpert <416365416c at gmail.com> wrote:

> Qt 5 gains this great new qmlRegisterSingletonApi function for
> exposing global functionality from C++. This is great but sometimes
> you want to write that global functionality in QML instead of C++. Use
> cases that come to mind include UI constants and a fake business logic
> backend when prototyping. How to expose this to QML is the real
> challenge, the details of how it works is pretty straight forward -
> the specified QML file acts as a factory and then it's the exact same
> as qmlRegisterSingleonApi.
> 
> My current concept for this feature is to add another keyword to
> qmldir. Like internal, you could mark a type as as singleton. So a
> qmldir could look like:
> 
> module Qt.labs.example
> Test 1.0 Test.qml
> Test 1.1 Test1.qml
> internal InternalType 1.1 Internal.qml
> singleton Single 1.1 single.qml
> 
> So when you import that module the Single type is a singleton and you
> can access methods and properties of the instance (which is just an
> instance of the object tree defined in single.qml). Note for the
> prototyping case this does mean you need a qmldir file, but those
> still work with relative paths so it can be as simple as import ".".

it's a bit weird that you need a qmldir for that. Wouldn't it be better if we could mark this as singleton in the implementation (ie. inside single.qml)? Maybe use a new keyword for that? static is already a reserved keyword in Ecmascript 5.1, so we could maybe write single.qml as:

static QtObject {
	property int myproperty;
	...
}

Cheers,
Lars

> 
> Keep in mind this feature may require language changes so I've no idea
> when it would actually land in Qt. But it'll never get in until there
> is agreement on how the feature should look.
> 
> --
> Alan Alpert
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