12.3 - The Qt Toolkit

Table of Contents

• 12.3.1 Qt Designer
• 12.3.2 Qt Signals and Slots

VR-Forces uses the Qt™ Toolkit from Qt Software to build the graphical user interface (GUI).

This section provides general information about the Qt toolkit and Qt Designer. For more information, please see Qt Software documentation.

12.3.1 Qt Designer

Qt Designer is a Qt application for designing and building user interfaces interactively. In Qt Designer, you can create custom widgets and save the results to a file. The files saved by Qt Designer (.ui files) are called forms. These files are XML files that you compile to source code using the Qt User Interface Compiler (UIC). The UIC takes a form file as input, and generates C++ header and source files as output. The resulting source files can then be compiled and linked into an application.

12.3.2 Qt Signals and Slots

Qt provides a mechanism for communicating between objects, known as signals and slots. Under this scheme, an object can emit a signal representing some event, and any number of objects can receive the signal if they are connected to the signal through slots (functions to handle the signal). It is a flexible alternative to traditional callbackcallback member functions. The Toolkit uses the Qt signal/slot mechanism for communicating between objects. If you plan to use this capability in your derived classes, remember the following:

• Only those classes derived from the Qt class QObject can use signals and slots.
• You must include the Q_OBJECT macro in the class definition of derived classes that contain signals and slots. Based on Qt documentation, we recommend that you include it in all classes derived from QObject.

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