How to show/hide a whole docking area?

Hi,

My application has a few widgets which are docked to the left docking area of my application. Now, there are times where I wish my central widget would get as much real estate as possible. So, in that context, I wish there I could hide all my docked widgets at once, effectively hiding the left docking area (and not hiding each docked widget individually). Ideally, there would be some kind of a button to the right of my left docking area which, when clicked, would either show/hide the whole left docking area. I have googled around a bit for this, but couldn't find anything useful, but I can't imagine this couldn't be done, so... anyone, any idea?

Cheers, Alan.

It is possible to do so, but the QDockWidget does not support this out of box. You will need to have a custom QDockWidget with a special button mechanism to hide / unhide, expect the button itself. That will mean that the dock widget will never be completely hidded, at-lest the button part of it will be visible.

Thanks, but if I was to have a 'special' QDockWidget, then it means that I could potentially move it around within the docking area. Also, it could be 'grouped' with one or several of my other docked widgets, etc. So, I am not sure how this could work efficiently for me...

If you don't want the QDockWidget to move around, then set QDockWidget::setFeatures(QDockWidget::NoDockWidget Features)

Also you could use QDockWidget::setTitleBarWidget(), to set the custom title bar which has the hide/show button.

Ah, I clearly didn't know about QDockWidget::setFeatures(QDockWidget::NoDockWidget Features) and together with QDockWidget::setTitleBarWidget(), I can see that working. Now, I wouldn't want that 'special' QDockWidget to be visible when no other docked widgets are, but I guess I could catch some signal to find out when there is only one QDockWidget object left (i.e. the 'special' one) and thus hide it?...

One other option is that you could use QMainWindow functions

QMainWindow::saveState()
QMainWindow::removeDockWidget() // remove all
...// Now central widget uses all the space
QMainWindow::addDockWidget() // Add them back
QMainWindow::restoreState()

Hmm... not sure that I like that solution, sorry. I mean that I have some menu items that I use to show/hide some dockable widgets, so that I get the feeling that it would mess everything up. No, I just want to be able to show/hide the docking area, not its docked widgets.