[Interest] Gettings signals to be emitted during keyPressEvent

[Murphy, Sean]

In my application, I've got a popup table that pops up when the user presses a key (in this case CTRL), and goes away when the user releases the key. While the table is visible, the user can click on rows to highlight a row. When the user highlights an item, a signal should be emitted from the table widget, and then another part of the application should mirror the highlighting action.

What I'm finding is that while the table is up, the signal to the parent class seems to just be getting queued, and the signal never propagates out UNTIL the key is released. So the action I'm looking for eventually occurs, but is delayed. Any ideas on how to get the signal acted on immediately? Relevant pseudocode below:

class MainWindow : public QMainWindow
{
public slots:
    void slotDoOtherStuff(QString, bool);

protected:
    virtual void keyPressEvent(QKeyEvent* event);
    virtual void keyReleaseEvent(QKeyEvent* event);

private:
    QTableView* dataTable;
    myModel* dataTableModel;
}

void MainWindow:: MainWindow (QWidget *parent)
{
      dataTable = new QTableView(this);
      dataTableModel = new myModel(this);
      dataTable->setModel(dataTableModel);
      connect(dataTableModel, SIGNAL(sigItemClicked(QString,bool)),
                this, SLOT(slotDoOtherStuff (QString,bool)));
}

void MainWindow::keyPressEvent(QKeyEvent *event)
{
    QMainWindow::keyPressEvent(event);
    if (event->key() == mPopupKey)
    {
       //populate table here
      dataTable->show();
}

void MainWindow::keyReleaseEvent(QKeyEvent *event)
{
    QMainWindow::keyPressEvent(event);
    if (event->key() == mPopupKey)
    {
        dataTable ->hide();
    }
}

void MainWindow:: slotDoOtherStuff(QString,bool) 
{
    QMainWindow::keyPressEvent(event);
    if (event->key() == mPopupKey)
    {
       //populate table here
      dataTable->show();
}

So in the pseudocode above, while the table is shown (i.e. while the CTRL key is held down), slotDoOtherStuff() never gets called until after the popup key is released. Then however many sigItemClicked() signals that were queued up are finally acted upon. So it looks like while the key is pressed, that part of the event loop isn't spinning? But the user can interact with the popup table while the key is pressed, so some part of the event loop is still active...

Sean