[Development] QAction-like API for QML

[André Somers]

Op 20-12-2012 11:40, Shawn Rutledge schreef:
> On 19 December 2012 09:13, André Somers <andre at familiesomers.nl> wrote:
>> Well, I disagree with that view of what an action represents. To me, the
>> core of an action really is bundling a bit of state with a trigger for
>> something to happen (I try to avoid the word 'action' here) in a
>> convenient API. That piece of state includes at minimum if that action
>> is available right now, and can also contain a value ('checked' is the
>> value that QAction can currently carry, so basically a boolean). That by
>> itself is already a very useful thing to have, as it provides a very
>> nice and clean way to expose functions on an API, especially for code in
>> a core layer of the application.
> Do you have some compelling, concrete examples of what you would use
> it for?  I agree with Alan and Jens, there's no point in adding
> clutter to Core unless it's really so useful that other things besides
> the new action class need to be based upon it.
Yes. I have been in a very real situation in a company where there was a 
very strict policy of *not* being allowed to use GUI libs from inside 
the core libraries. It resulted in a lot of hard to maintain, bridge 
code where being able to use a non-gui action from the core would have 
been quite simple. And yes, you can argue that that policy is wrong and 
misguided, but the fact of the matter is that it exists in real places 
where Qt is used. And frankly, I agree with the gist of it: it makes no 
sense to introduce GUI concepts into core libraries of an application. 
Icons, shortcuts and whatnot don't have a legitimate place there. But 
the idea of a QCoreAction/QTrigger or whatever you want to call it makes 
perfect sense for the API interface of a core library with a GUI 
library. At least, it does to me.

André