Adding slots in Designer

[jamos]

I'm in the proces of evaluating Qt 4.1.2 for a project that was originally written in MFC.. and I'm trying to wrap my head around things. I'm working in Visual Studio 2005; for my test I'm building a simple app with some combo boxes.

At the moment I am puzzled as to how to add slots to my window class. Designer does not seem to have any facility to add slots to a class (am I missing something?) So I have to add them by hand. However -

- If I manually add slots to my class (QtTest, derived from QMainWindow), the slots do not show up in Designer, so I can't use Designer's signal/slot facilities.

- If I were to add the slots to ui_QtTestClass, then they will be overwritten the next time I edit the form in Designer - am I correct?

I must be missing something; there's no point in having all this signal/slot support in Designer if there's no way to add slots through Designer...

[jpn]

At the moment I am puzzled as to how to add slots to my window class. Designer does not seem to have any facility to add slots to a class (am I missing something?) So I have to add them by hand.

Yes, you have to add them by hand.

- If I manually add slots to my class (QtTest, derived from QMainWindow), the slots do not show up in Designer, so I can't use Designer's signal/slot facilities.

True, you would have to create a custom widget plugin for the designer.

- If I were to add the slots to ui_QtTestClass, then they will be overwritten the next time I edit the form in Designer - am I correct?

Correct. You are not supposed to modify headers generated by uic.

[wysota]

A general approach for Qt4 is to design your user interfaces in Qt Designer and then either inherit or incorporate them in a regular C++ class derived from one of QWidget descendants and use the designed UI by calling setupUi().

class MyMainWindow : public QMainWindow, private Ui::MyMainWindow {
//...
};

class MyMainWindow : public QMainWindow, private Ui::MyMainWindow {
//...
};

To copy to clipboard, switch view to plain text mode 

or

class MyMainWindow : public QMainWindow {
//...
private:
  Ui::MyMainWindow ui;
//...
};

class MyMainWindow : public QMainWindow {
//...
private:
  Ui::MyMainWindow ui;
//...
};

To copy to clipboard, switch view to plain text mode 

[jamos]

Wow. This essentially makes Designer worthless except as a layout tool.

OK. I'll swim with that. Thanks.

[wysota]

It is strictly a layout tool (of course you can manage signals and slot connections there too) and not an IDE.

[gfunk]

Indeed, QtDesigner simply integrates into Visual Studio 2005, and piggy-backs off of Microsoft's debugger, compiler, etc. Visual Studio 2005 is still your IDE.