Qt Creator QWT Plugin Installation in QT Creator 4.7.4 on Windows 7

Hello all,

I am working with QT Creator 4.7.4, and using the embedded designer. I have a need to utilize the QWT plugin in the embedded designer as the look-and-feel person on the project is not a C++ developer, and is instead most comfortable with the designer interface and the CSS editor in there.

My OS is Windows 7 Premium 64-bit, the QT Creator build is the downloaded binary build from Nokia.

I'm writing this post b/c it took me about 7 hours to figure out how to do this, and none of the existing posts covered all of the required steps, and generally assumed a LOT about the audience's deep inner knowledge of the workings of Qt and MSVC++ or included information which is since out-of-date =)

Warning: if you are using the downloaded binary of 4.7.4 from Nokia, you can NOT use the 4.8.0 libraries to build the QWT plugin. This will lead to much frustration. You must, instead, use the 4.7.4 libraries to build it.

First, ensure that you have the 4.7.4 MSVC2008 build targets installed, use the QT SDK package manager to install this.

Now, install the Microsoft Windows SDK 7.1

Using the Windows SDK Command prompt (from All Programs -> Microsoft Windows SDK 7.1), run the following commands after changing to the directory where you unpacked QWT.

> setenv /x86 /Release

(This is extremely important for those of us on 64-bit windows, as the qt dll's are 32-bit by default)

> c:\QtSDK\Desktop\Qt\4.7.4\msvc2008\bin\qmake.exe qwt.pro -r CONFIG+=debug_and_release CONFIG+=build_all
> nmake

(note: the above step must be repeated several times due to mt.exe NOT being included with the microsoft windows SDK 7.1, repeat 2-3 times and you will succeed)

> nmake install
> qmake -set QMAKEFEATURES "C:/Qwt-6.0.2-svn/features"

These are the relevant environment variables before starting QT Creator:

QT_PLUGIN_PATH=c:\Qwt-6.0.2-svn\plugins\designer\;c:\Qwt-6.0.2-svn\plugins

Make sure that PATH has C:\Qwt-6.0.2-svn\lib in it.

Note: my paths above assume that you're using the current svn snapshot of QWT and you haven't modified the install path.

Hope this helps someone struggling with the same!