Qt Designer - expose child widget in Custom Container Widget Plugin

[fusion23]

I have a custom widget I've made. It consists of a custom QPushButton and a QFrame in a vertical layout. Within the QFrame is a QWidget used as a container. Click the button to toggle the visibility of the widget inside the frame and the frame will resize. This creates a nice expanding widget. I can use this widget without problems programmatically, but I want to design in a WYSIWYG manner, so I need to create a QtDesigner plugin.

I've created a small test widget, MyWidget, that mimics the above. It has a button and a widget in a vertical layout. The plugin, mywidgetplugin returns true for isContainer(). I can see and place MyWidget inside Qt Designer and place widgets onto MyWidget. While this is cool, it's not the exact functionality I need. I need to be able to place widgets onto the container widget inside MyWidget (see attached image).

6598

Does anybody know how to expose a child widget of a custom widget via a plugin so Qt Designer can see it as a viable container?

I was hacking around and I tried this...it almost works until it crashes Designer when I click and drag the mouse over the container widget. (probably because I'm doing something stupid, but I don't know enough programming to avoid it). It also doesn't save properly because when I reopen the ui file the original container widget (with all the new checkboxes/radio buttons/etc inside) is now just a free floating child of MyWidget, and MyWidget has its own clean container widget. This probably has something to do with *child pointer and how MyWidget gets recreated when I reload the ui file, but I don't know enough to troubleshoot this.

My Widget:


MyWidget::MyWidget(QWidget *parent) :
QWidget(parent)
{
QVBoxLayout *layout = new QVBoxLayout(this);
QPushButton *button = new QPushButton();
button->setObjectName("__qt__passive_button");
QWidget *containerWidget = new QWidget();
containerWidget->setObjectName("container");
layout->addWidget(button);
layout->addWidget(containerWidget);

}


Here's the hack to the plugin:

void MyWidgetPlugin::initialize(QDesignerFormEditorInte rface *formEditor)
{
if (m_initialized)
return;

// Add extension registrations, etc. here

manager = formEditor->formWindowManager();
qDebug() << manager;

m_initialized = true;
}

bool MyWidgetPlugin::isInitialized() const
{
return m_initialized;
}

QWidget *MyWidgetPlugin::createWidget(QWidget *parent)
{
QWidget *myWidget = new MyWidget(parent);

if (manager)
formWindow = manager->formWindow(0);

QWidget *child = myWidget->layout()->itemAt(1)->widget();
if (formWindow)
formWindow->manageWidget(child);

return myWidget;
}



Here is an image comparing before and after the hack. I'd like to be able to do what is in the right image legitimately if Qt Designer allows. I found this old post that seems to imply it might not be possible:

http://www.qtcentre.org/threads/16972-Container-plugins?highlight=container

Any help would be much appreciated. I would much rather setup my little widgets in a WYSIWYG fashion than by programming.

Kevin

[fusion23]

I found a solution using the multipagewidgetplugin for MyWidget, but treating it as only a 1 page widget. I tested it in PyQt at work. I'll post a longer response with code when I get home tonight. I had tried this approach before, but I didn't fully understand what was happening...now I think I do.

-Kevin