[Development] Notes from the QWidget session

Olivier Goffart olivier at woboq.com
Fri Jun 29 11:57:58 CEST 2012


On Friday 29 June 2012 11:50:55 Alan Alpert wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 12:56:06 ext Harri Porten wrote:
> >   - Converter of .ui files to QML?
> 
> That's a good idea, and actually pretty close to useful already. All you
> really need to do is to register all the QWidget types into a QtWidgets
> import, they're already QObjects and I think all designable attributes are
> already marked as properties. Write a plugin that's all qmlRegisterType
> lines, and a utility that turns XML into QML (trivial, and I think I still
> have one lying around from ye olde days ;) ) and it should be pretty
> simple.
> 
> Mind you, there's a big difference between QML and .ui2 - this is one reason
> why there's a QtQuick module instead of just using the Qt Widgets in QML.
> Without signals on the properties, bindings won't work. Also without a
> default children property, the hierarchy doesn't build up naturally (or at
> all, the plugin of just qmlRegisterTypes might only work for single widget
> scenes). Neither the property set nor the property implementation is geared
> towards animation in widgets, so I doubt you'd get good results from trying
> to animate it using QML animations (worth a test though). All are fixable,
> but would require significant work on the widget set. All these issues are
> also reaching beyond features that are provided by .ui files, so go past
> the issue of porting from Qt 4.
> 
> I thought I had an ancient example which exposed QWidget in 4.6, but I can't
> find it. For the reasons described, it wasn't very useful anyway. The key
> point is that you can have any tree of QObjects described in QML, and it
> would be trivial to create a wrapper that places the root item as the
> central widget in a QMainWindow, as opposed to the current wrapper which
> places the root item into a QQuickItem scene.

The idea was more to do a mapping to get it works with the desktop components:

QPushButton ->  Button
    text -> text
    default -> defaultButton
    icon -> iconSource
    ...

QLineEdit -> TextField
    text -> text
    readOnly-> readOnly
    displayText -> placeHolderText
    ...


There is a lot of properties to map.  Not every property can be mapped, and 
there may be some trick required for some types (such as QIcon)


The idea is that you would run such a script once over all your .ui files. 
when you port your application to QML.  
That may save you a lot of time if you have several handreds of forms to port 
(qt-creator has 207 .ui files)
The script may leave comments in the code about stuff it could not port.

Once the script is run, you are only half done. You still need to ajust the 
C++ part.


Is it worth the effort to implement such a tool?
Or will the developer will anyway re-write their entire UI from scratch 
(including all the dialogs) if they want to move away from QtWidgets? 
(Or maybe there is really no reason to move away from QtWidgets,  and one 
should continue to use it for dialogs)

-- 
Olivier

Woboq - Qt services and support - http://woboq.com



More information about the Development mailing list