[Qt-interest] Trying to create custom Qt Designer plugin for real-time data

[Keith Nicewarner]

I'm pretty new to creating designer plugins, so I wanted to ask for guidance on how to proceed. We have various sources of real-time data (from DAQ cards, generated from other data, or played back from a log file). Most of the analysts are not programmers but they want to create a GUI to look at the data.  They want to use LabView but we have existing C++ DAQ infrastructure on Linux so I'd prefer to use that.  I was thinking I could let them use Qt Designer and create custom widgets that somehow hook into the RT data. For instance, the simplest widget would be a name/value pair: a widget containing 2 labels: one that is the name of the channel and the other is the value that gets updated periodically from the data source. The user grabs this widget from the designer widget list and drags it onto their dialog. Then they specify the (custom) channel name property in the widget. They drag and drop a bunch of these, then when they are happy with the layout, they build an app that contains the data reader and their UI form. My intent is that they would not have to touch any C++ code. The data reader app would be generic in that it produces an array of name-value pairs (values are all double). On initialization, the custom widgets somehow register with the data stream by channel name. I've tried to create this example but I don't see how to add a custom property for the channel name. Or should I just use the widget instance name? Or maybe I'm going about this all wrong and should be using slots and signals to get the data to the widgets. In other words, the user would use the slot editor tool to make the associations. But what would be providing the signals? The data provider is not a widget -- it has no drawable features by itself.

Any ideas how I should go about doing this? Or is it impossible?
Thanks.
Keith.

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