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+/****************************************************************************
+**
+** Copyright (C) 2009 Nokia Corporation and/or its subsidiary(-ies).
+** Contact: Nokia Corporation (qt-info@nokia.com)
+**
+** This file is part of the documentation of the Qt Toolkit.
+**
+** $QT_BEGIN_LICENSE:LGPL$
+** No Commercial Usage
+** This file contains pre-release code and may not be distributed.
+** You may use this file in accordance with the terms and conditions
+** contained in the either Technology Preview License Agreement or the
+** Beta Release License Agreement.
+**
+** GNU Lesser General Public License Usage
+** Alternatively, this file may be used under the terms of the GNU Lesser
+** General Public License version 2.1 as published by the Free Software
+** Foundation and appearing in the file LICENSE.LGPL included in the
+** packaging of this file. Please review the following information to
+** ensure the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 requirements
+** will be met: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html.
+**
+** In addition, as a special exception, Nokia gives you certain
+** additional rights. These rights are described in the Nokia Qt LGPL
+** Exception version 1.0, included in the file LGPL_EXCEPTION.txt in this
+** package.
+**
+** GNU General Public License Usage
+** Alternatively, this file may be used under the terms of the GNU
+** General Public License version 3.0 as published by the Free Software
+** Foundation and appearing in the file LICENSE.GPL included in the
+** packaging of this file. Please review the following information to
+** ensure the GNU General Public License version 3.0 requirements will be
+** met: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.
+**
+** If you are unsure which license is appropriate for your use, please
+** contact the sales department at http://qt.nokia.com/contact.
+** $QT_END_LICENSE$
+**
+****************************************************************************/
+
+/*!
+ \page objecttrees.html
+ \title Object Trees and Object Ownership
+ \brief Information about the parent-child pattern used to describe
+ object ownership in Qt.
+
+ \section1 Overview
+
+ \link QObject QObjects\endlink organize themselves in object trees.
+ When you create a QObject with another object as parent, it's added to
+ the parent's \link QObject::children() children() \endlink list, and
+ is deleted when the parent is. It turns out that this approach fits
+ the needs of GUI objects very well. For example, a \l QShortcut
+ (keyboard shortcut) is a child of the relevant window, so when the
+ user closes that window, the shorcut is deleted too.
+
+ \l QWidget, the base class of everything that appears on the screen,
+ extends the parent-child relationship. A child normally also becomes a
+ child widget, i.e. it is displayed in its parent's coordinate system
+ and is graphically clipped by its parent's boundaries. For example,
+ when the application deletes a message box after it has been
+ closed, the message box's buttons and label are also deleted, just as
+ we'd want, because the buttons and label are children of the message
+ box.
+
+ You can also delete child objects yourself, and they will remove
+ themselves from their parents. For example, when the user removes a
+ toolbar it may lead to the application deleting one of its \l QToolBar
+ objects, in which case the tool bar's \l QMainWindow parent would
+ detect the change and reconfigure its screen space accordingly.
+
+ The debugging functions \l QObject::dumpObjectTree() and \l
+ QObject::dumpObjectInfo() are often useful when an application looks or
+ acts strangely.
+
+ \target note on the order of construction/destruction of QObjects
+ \section1 Construction/Destruction Order of QObjects
+
+ When \l {QObject} {QObjects} are created on the heap (i.e., created
+ with \e new), a tree can be constructed from them in any order, and
+ later, the objects in the tree can be destroyed in any order. When any
+ QObject in the tree is deleted, if the object has a parent, the
+ destructor automatically removes the object from its parent. If the
+ object has children, the destructor automatically deletes each
+ child. No QObject is deleted twice, regardless of the order of
+ destruction.
+
+ When \l {QObject} {QObjects} are created on the stack, the same
+ behavior applies. Normally, the order of destruction still doesn't
+ present a problem. Consider the following snippet:
+
+ \snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_objecttrees.qdoc 0
+
+ The parent, \c window, and the child, \c quit, are both \l {QObject}
+ {QObjects} because QPushButton inherits QWidget, and QWidget inherits
+ QObject. This code is correct: the destructor of \c quit is \e not
+ called twice because the C++ language standard \e {(ISO/IEC 14882:2003)}
+ specifies that destructors of local objects are called in the reverse
+ order of their constructors. Therefore, the destructor of
+ the child, \c quit, is called first, and it removes itself from its
+ parent, \c window, before the destructor of \c window is called.
+
+ But now consider what happens if we swap the order of construction, as
+ shown in this second snippet:
+
+ \snippet doc/src/snippets/code/doc_src_objecttrees.qdoc 1
+
+ In this case, the order of destruction causes a problem. The parent's
+ destructor is called first because it was created last. It then calls
+ the destructor of its child, \c quit, which is incorrect because \c
+ quit is a local variable. When \c quit subsequently goes out of scope,
+ its destructor is called again, this time correctly, but the damage has
+ already been done.
+*/