Stumbling Toward 'Awesomeness'

So the past few nights I was racking my brain a bit to get multiple widgets adding to a listview. I wanted to see a list of animations, each item in the list needed to have clickable buttons, and special labels.

I scoured the internets, and dusted off my old trusty ‘Rapid GUI Programming with Python and QT‘ book, I got the idea for the above from the ‘Composite Widgets’ chapter subsection, though they don’t use setItemWidget to insert a composite widget into another widget.

Here is what my QtDesigner file looked like:

I wanted to dynamically load a UI file of a custom widget and compile it with the UIC module. I first looked at making a delegate, but I just could not get that working, if you have done this with a delegate, let me know in the comments! (From the docs, it seems delegates cannot be composites of multiple widgets)

In the end I used pyuic4 to compile the above UI file into a python code, I dumped this, minus the form/window code, into a class I derive from QWidget:

class animItemWidget(QtGui.QWidget):
    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(animItemWidget, self).__init__()
        self.horizontalLayout_4 = QtGui.QHBoxLayout(self)
        self.horizontalLayout_4.setSpacing(2)
        self.horizontalLayout_4.setMargin(3)
        #blah, blah, blah

At the bottom of that length UI frenzy of an init, let’s connect a button to a function:

self.connect(self.button02, QtCore.SIGNAL("clicked()"), self.awesome)

Now define that function, let’s just print that the animation that the widget in the list whose button you clicked is AWESOME:

    def awesome(self):
        print self.label.text() + ' is awesome!'

This could do anything with the anim name or various data bound to this object, like check out/sync a file from Perforce, load a file in Maya, etc.

Now let’s make our main window. We are going to use setItemWidget to insert our animItemWidget into the QListWidget called ‘list’. Notice that I have access to every UI element in the composite widget.

from PyQt4 import QtGui, QtCore, uic
 
class uiControlTest(QtGui.QMainWindow):
    def __init__(self):
        super(uiControlTest, self).__init__()
        self.ui = uic.loadUi('uiControlTest.ui')
        self.ui.show()
 
        for i in range(0,100):
            wid = animItemWidget()
            wid.label_2.setText('Last edited by chrise @2014.06.21:23:17')
            wid.label.setText('Animation ' + str(i))
 
            wid2 = QtGui.QListWidgetItem()
            wid2.setSizeHint(QtCore.QSize(100, 40))
            self.ui.list.addItem(wid2)
            self.ui.list.setItemWidget(wid2, wid)

Now, of course, in my example I just quickly made a bunch of widgets, so their names are all default, but you get the idea. If you have a better way to do this, perhaps something more performant, please let me know in the comments.

Note: It looks like that book is freely available on a college class website, save yourself 50 bucks: http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/urbansim/books/pyqt-book.pdf