I have a general question concerning widgets.

I am working on a computational program. The user selects a widget that is then added to a tabwidget. Each selected widget "form" has user added input and computed output. Depending on the type of widget selected the input can vary, but the output is mostly the same. Each widget "form" has a corresponding class that performs the computation. Currently I copy the contents of the widget to a structure and pass the structure to the computation class. The computation class modifies the output contents of the structure and then I copy the results to the output portion of the original widget.

Rather than copy the widget contents to a structure and passing the structure I would like to simply pass a handle to the widget itself. So far I haven't had any luck with this. Is this allowed in Qt? Can anyone point me to a forum, article or example similar to this?