[Qt-creator] Using flickable in QTCreator Designer

[kai.koehne at nokia.com]

Hi Tobias,
  
> I have been looking at the version of QtCreator passed along with the Qt4 
> technical preview. 
>  
> First - very good work. I like the automatic snap-functions very much! It 
> looks good and the overall impressions is that it is fluid and nice to 
> work with. The context help for QML-documents are very good!

good to hear :)
 
> I still miss a few things in the visual editor for QML-documents. Is there 
> a roadmap that describe what to expect?

No, we don't have an official roadmap about individual features.

> For me it is very important that the visual editor is good so that our 
> design team can do and try as much as possible without having to deal with 
> QML-code. I would prefer if using lists, flickable, flipable etc would be 
> a part of the visual editor. Dealing with (at least simple) transitions 
> (animations) between states and different pages in the visual editor would 
> also be very nice. 

I agree. Especially the support for visual editing of transitions 
is a feature I'd _love_ to have in the Quick Designer, but I'm afraid it won't
make it for QtCreator 2.0.

> To me it only seems like one can nest things into rectangles and items. I 
> have tried to nest things into flickable and flipable using the visual 
> editor without any success. 

In the Quick item set all items can have 'children'. Anyhow, we restrict this
in the visual editor for some elements - most of the time you don't want that
e.g. a Text element is a container, and allowing this in the visual editor
makes reparenting there pretty unusable.

Anyhow, that Flickable isn't a container is probably 
just an oversight. Flipable is somewhat special in that it has the front and row
properties, and when reparenting something you most certainly want to add the new
child to either front or back, not the generic "children" property ... I'm not
sure if we can support this element properly for 2.0 though.

> If I manually edit the QML and put things into 
> a flickable the things is no longer shown in the navigator pane. 
> The state 
> pane show the content considering clipping etc. The visual editor pane 
> show the children of the flickable without considering clipping.

That's clearly a bug. I'll look into it.

> I can 
> edit the children even though they not appear in the navigator pane.
> I can't find anything related to transitions or animations.
>  
> If I manually edit the QML-document and switch back to the visual editor 
> QTCreator die.

Incidentally I was just investigating a crash in the Flickable element that might be related:

http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-9161

Anyhow, a stack trace would be great :)

> It seems to me that the current version of the QTCreator only provide 
> editing capabilities of static layouts. The ability to add more advanced 
> objects (like flickable) have no practical use. Is this the level of 
> implementation that is intended for the next release of Qt?

Well ... the first version of Quick Designer coming with Qt Creator 2.0 won't 
be 'feature complete' in the sense that you never have to switch to the text editor - the most 
obvious thing is the missing support for editing transitions you mentioned. 
But it will IMO be useful nevertheless, and with the tight integration to the text editor 
you should be able to do stuff in text that isn't supported in the Quick Designer yet. Anyhow,
I'm sure it will get a lot more powerful over time.

Tanks a lot for your detailed feedback! I'm really appreciating it.

Regards

Kai Koehne

who tries to spread the usage of "Quick Designer", to avoid confusion with Qt Designer.