Best way to access one element (widget or layout)

[wysota]

The best way is through private members (e.g. pointers) and proper encapsulation.

[Julieng031]

Ok, thanks for your answer! I'm going to continue with this way to implement my code.

[ChrisW67]

There's a small overhead of a pointer-per-widget, but member variables are the way to do it for the vast majority of cases. If you use Designer and uic then the generated code uses member variables in exactly the fashion you describe.

The alternative is to not keep those pointers, but uniquely name each widget, and then use QObject::findChild() to walk recursively down the QObject ownership tree looking for a match (or matches) on name and type. A whole tree walk comparing and casting is much slower then direct access via a stored pointer. This approach is useful for dynamically constructed UIs where the structure cannot be known in advance (perhaps using QUiLoader).

[Julieng031]

Thanks a lot, ChrisW67, for you additional answer.