Workaround for StandardItemModel drag drop bug

[onamatic]

I have a QTreeView with a QStandardItemModel implementing a simple "notebook" type of application (ie: a bunch of notes inside a bunch of folders).

Everything is fine except for internally drag/dropping a folder in the treeview when all the notes in the dragged folder get lost.
This is a known bug and is detailed here: Drag and drop in QTreeView with QStandardItemModel and InternalMove loses children

Without this functionality I'm truly stuck, so I'm now subclassing QStandardItemModel

class QNotesStandardItemModel : public QStandardItemModel

class QNotesStandardItemModel : public QStandardItemModel

To copy to clipboard, switch view to plain text mode 

and trying to manually sort things out in:

bool QNotesStandardItemModel::dropMimeData ( const QMimeData * data, Qt::DropAction action, int row, int column, const QModelIndex & parent ){
	QStringList list = data->formats();
	if (!data->hasFormat("application/x-qabstractitemmodeldatalist")) return false;
	QByteArray encodedData = data->data("application/x-qabstractitemmodeldatalist");

bool QNotesStandardItemModel::dropMimeData ( const QMimeData * data, Qt::DropAction action, int row, int column, const QModelIndex & parent ){
	QStringList list = data->formats();
	if (!data->hasFormat("application/x-qabstractitemmodeldatalist")) return false;
	QByteArray encodedData = data->data("application/x-qabstractitemmodeldatalist");

To copy to clipboard, switch view to plain text mode 

And now I'm stuck!
QUESTION 1: encodedData contains a QList<QModelIndex> but how do I get at it? I want a kind of "qobject_cast<QModelIndexList>(encodedData)" type of thing! Just can't see how though.

QUESTION 2: Is there an easy way of working round the "lost children" problem? I really wanted to keep this application as simple as possible and not have to subclass standard classes which generally work fine out of the box.