Interesting installation problem

[OzQTNoob]

Okay so after rereading a few installation guides of the move your dll's her, there and everywhere I decided that I actually needed to follow Uwe's INSTALL guide so that the qwt libs etc are kept seperate from the Qt install. Should add that I am on a window7 32 bit machine running windows XP.

With that in mind I decided to delete any qwt.dll, qwtd.dll, qwt*designer.dll's that I had scattered through the Qt install (in only 2 directories actually, the /bin and /designer directories). I should add that this way did let me see the qwt widgets in the creator.

So I
1) recompiled qwt with mingw to make it compatible with my Qt version and Qt Creator version and installed it, via the INSTALL instruction in my C:\ directory.
2) Set the QMAKEFEATURES (this all showed up so all good so far)
3) created a new windows environment variable called QT_PLUGIN_PATH and set it to the plugin directory of my QWT install
4) started up Qt Creator (I am using Qt 4.7.4 I think it is, and Qt Creator 2, either way they are not a problem, nor is QWT really) and loaded my project, which has the CONFIG +=qwt in the PRO file
5) went to the form editor within creator and lo and behold my qwt widgets had gone. No problem. Wasn't to concerned (still not actually)
6) built my project anyway and was pleased to see that the QWT plots were in the application anyway. So I conclude that my QMAKEFEATURES setting has worked. So onto the designer/creator issue and this is where it gets interesting (at least I think it does)

If I place the qwt.dll and qwtd.dll (built both release and debug, built the release separately to ensure everything was correct) in the Qt bin directory (as I had in my bad install which worked) and then restart Qt creator the widgets show up again in the creator (form creator) with all the Qt widgets. And if I look at the loaded plugins then I can see that the qwt_designwer plugin is in fact being found in my qwt install directory as per the QT_PLUGIN_PATH variable. So I could leave it at that, but this is not the correct way to install.

However, if I remove the dll's from the bin directory the plugin doesn't load and shows up as a failed plugin e.g. it cant find the qwt.dll's. So I am thinking that I have done something stupid somewhere. It appears that the even though Qt looks for the qwt_designerplugin.dll in the correct directory (my qwt install directory via the QT_PLUGIN_PATH variable) it is trying to find the rest of the qwt dll's needed for the plugin in the actual Qt bin directory?

Is this simply a change I need to make in the qwt.prf and/or qwtconfig.pri files? or is it something else?

Cheers
Oz

[Uwe]

However, if I remove the dll's from the bin directory the plugin doesn't load and shows up as a failed plugin e.g. it cant find the qwt.dll's. So I am thinking that I have done something stupid somewhere.

DLLs are found using the PATH variable. You have to add the path for Qwt libraries there.

Uwe

[OzQTNoob]

Hi Uwe,

I did actually add the following to my path variable C:\qwt-601\lib (or however the qwt directory looks) but when I look in the build properties in my project it doesn't list the qwt directory at all. I may need to brush up on my PATH directory bits-and-pieces as there are a number of paths listed but not all of them show up. I dont really care about the ones that are not needed, but I will recheck tomorrow when I get back in front of my work computer and see if I have entered something incorrectly.

Cheers
Oz