Book Image

Application Development with Qt Creator - Third Edition

By : Lee Zhi Eng, Ray Rischpater
Book Image

Application Development with Qt Creator - Third Edition

By: Lee Zhi Eng, Ray Rischpater

Overview of this book

Qt is a powerful development framework that serves as a complete toolset for building cross-platform applications, helping you reduce development time and improve productivity. Completely revised and updated to cover C++17 and the latest developments in Qt 5.12, this comprehensive guide is the third edition of Application Development with Qt Creator. You'll start by designing a user interface using Qt Designer and learn how to instantiate custom messages, forms, and dialogues. You'll then understand Qt's support for multithreading, a key tool for making applications responsive, and the use of Qt's Model-View-Controller (MVC) to display data and content. As you advance, you'll learn to draw images on screen using Graphics View Framework and create custom widgets that interoperate with Qt Widgets. This Qt programming book takes you through Qt Creator's latest features, such as Qt Quick Controls 2, enhanced CMake support, a new graphical editor for SCXML, and a model editor. You'll even work with multimedia and sensors using Qt Quick, and finally develop applications for mobile, IoT, and embedded devices using Qt Creator. By the end of this Qt book, you'll be able to create your own cross-platform applications from scratch using Qt Creator and the C++ programming language.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
7
Section 2: Advanced Features
12
Section 3: Practical Matters

Using states and transitions in Qt Quick

Traditional GUI programming often involves easy-to-write but boilerplate state machines for controls to track control and application states. For example, a button might have several states: when the mouse hovers over it; when it's pressed; and then once pressed, a separate state for on or off in the case of a checkbox or a push button. While this code isn't hard to write, it does involve some writing, and more sophisticated interfaces require more of it.

Qt Quick provides an abstraction for this through its State construct, which groups a state's name as well as the condition under which it occurs and which properties of an object should take on new values. We first saw this in Chapter 3, Designing Your Application with Qt Designer, when we wrote our own button component, reprinted here:

import QtQuick 2.12
import QtQuick...