[Interest] QtDesigner needs redesign.

[Serge K]

Среда,  4 января 2017, 14:39 +03:00 от Jean-Michaël Celerier < jeanmichael.celerier at gmail.com >:
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>On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:58 AM, Viktor Engelmann  < viktor.engelmann at qt.io > wrote:
>>
>>Custom components in Qt are just QWidget derivates and they can be taken
>>from a designer plugin. This requires some extra code for making them
>>findable (+give them an icon and name etc.) and plugins are technically
>>shared libraries. This explains very clearly why recompiling a custom
>>component requires a restart if we want a perfect preview like in .net,
>>but I still think that there is a lot of room for improvement.
>
>Something that would, I think, boost the usage of the designer is to skip the "recompilation" part 
>and just have something that scans your code and interprets the C++ instead of compiling it, with 
>something like  https://github.com/RuntimeCompiledCPlusPlus/RuntimeCompiledCPlusPlus .
>
>You would just add some metadata to your Widget with Q_CLASSINFO("DesignerName", "My widget"), 
>the code looks for classes with this specific key, "compiles" it and adds it to the designer.
And how implementation ot this differs from  clean rebuild? Plugin is a shared library with some specific macros - these macros already are related to Designer and nothing else. And pluign contains specific C++ code to be supported by Designer. Even entire additional class with set of mandatory methods needed for each plugin main class. And plugin can depend from other files including resources and so on. Which one another "compiler" should process this all? Isn't that a "micros..t-like-way" to build monstrous and expensive tools? OH, NO!

Exactly  plugin auto reloading feature needed for Designer. It is much more simpler and powerful that add just another one macro and create another one compiler. But... this cannot help with other annoying issue when developing plugins. Even Designer custom plugins need to be debugged. Now in "designer mode" even qDebug() doesn't work. Nothing to say about interactive debugger. It doesn't work for plugins loaded to Designer. The only way to debug is - include QMessageBox() and hope the QtCreator won't crash. Yes... it crashes if Designer plugin contains errors. It crashes immediately if you just call QMessageBox() in paintEvent() of custom plugin. I developed custom extended plugin based on QSlider. It allows load SVG animated images for groove and knob and has some other useful features (they cannot be implemented using stylesheets). First time when running in application it looked very different from when it was run in Designer. Yes - application and designed worked on different platforms. I killed lot of time (about week) to understand why they are different and how I must fix this. Without ANY debugging options while plugin runs in Designer. I had to explore source code of several Qt internal classes to understand how this works. But with normal debugging feature I would find solution within minutes.
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