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/****************************************************************************
**
** Copyright (C) 2009 Nokia Corporation and/or its subsidiary(-ies).
** Contact: Qt Software Information (qt-info@nokia.com)
**
** This file is part of the documentation of the Qt Toolkit.
**
** $QT_BEGIN_LICENSE:LGPL$
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** You may use this file in accordance with the terms and conditions
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****************************************************************************/
/*!
\page tutorials-declarative-contacts.html
\startpage {index.html}{Qt Reference Documentation}
\nextpage {tutorials/declarative/contacts/part1}{Chapter 1}
\title Declarative UI Tutorial
\ingroup howto
\ingroup tutorials
\brief An introduction to using Qt Declarative UI to put together a
simple animated application.
\omit
At the time of writing the tutorial Declarative UI was still under
development. It is extremely likely that an update will be required
prior to 4.6 release.
\endomit
This tutorial gives an introduction to using the Qt Declarative UI
animation framework.
In this process we will learn about some of the basics of using
Declarative UI, such as
\list
\o Basic drawing
\o States and Transitions
\o Reuse of components
\o Models and Views
\endlist
An existing knowledge of Qt is not required.
The tutorial's source code is located in Qt's
\c examples/declarative/tutorials/contacts directory.
It is split up into a number of sub directories, and within each
sub directory the files are numbered in an order of increasing features.
The code in this example is not compiled, but interpreted at run time.
This means you should use the qmlviewer application provided with
Qt to run the examples.
\list
\o \l{tutorials/declarative/contacts/part1}{Drawing and Animation}
\o \l{tutorials/declarative/contacts/part2}{Reusing QML Components}
\o \l{tutorials/declarative/contacts/part3}{Models, Views and Delegates}
\endlist
*/
/*!
\page tutorials-declarative-contacts-part1.html
\contentspage {Declarative UI Tutorial}{Contents}
\nextpage {tutorials/declarative/contacts/part2}{Chapter 2}
\example tutorials/declarative/contacts/part1
\title Drawing and Animation
\tableofcontents
The first part of this tutorial covers basic drawing of elements on the
screen and causing them to animate.
\section1 Drawing
In this first chapter we will build a button that indicates something
can be removed and asks for confirmation. When clicked it will expand
from a small button with a trash can icon, to a wide button with a
confirm icon on the left, the text "Remove" in the middle, and a
cancel icon on the right.
\image declarative-removebutton.gif
Because Declarative UI is declarative, you don't pass instructions on
what to paint in a sequential manner as you may be used to. Instead
elements and how they appear on the screen are declared in much the
same was as elements on a web page are declared. This is done using
the Qt Markup Language which we will refer to by the abbreviation QML
for the remainder of the tutorial.
We will start by drawing a simple red rectangle with rounded corners.
\image declarative-roundrect.png
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/1_Drawing_and_Animation/1/RemoveButton.qml 0
This is one of the simplest of QML components. It describes a rectangle with
some simple properties. In QML all components start with a capital
letter, and their properties with lower case letters.
Apart from the properties all QML components share, the \l{Rectangle}{Rectangle} component has the properties
\list
\o color - The background color of the rectangle
\o tintColor - The overlay color of the rectangle
\o gradientColor - The color at the base of the rectangle to blend upwards
\o pen - The description of how to draw the border of the rectangle
\o radius - The corner radius used to draw rounded rectangles.
\endlist
There are also a number of properties all QML components shares, described
in the \l{Item}{Item} element reference documentation. The rectangle drawn in the
above code uses the properties;
\list
\o id - An identifier of the component
\o width - the width of the component when drawn
\o height - the height of the component when drawn
\endlist
Currently we have described a rectangle with a width and height of 30 pixels, filled in with
the color red and with rounded corners using a radius of 5.
\section1 Layout
The next step of the tutorial adds an image over the rectangle. We
will do this by adding an \l{Image}{Image} component as a child of the
\l{Rectangle}{Rectangle} component. All QML components have a list of children which
are drawn in order after the parent component has been drawn.
By having the \l{Image}{Image}
component as a child of the \l{Rectangle}{Rectangle} component we ensure it is drawn
over the \l{Rectangle}{Rectangle} component. Children also are affected by the opacity
of the parent component and calculate their position in within the bounds of
the parent component.
\image declarative-removebutton-close.png
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/1_Drawing_and_Animation/2/RemoveButton.qml 0
The trashIcon image is added as a child of the Rectangle. In this case
the children property isn't explicitly used because the default property
of the \l{Rectangle}{Rectangle} component is its children. Some elements often don't have children
and use some other default component. When this is the case its possible
to explicitly list the sub component as a child as follows:
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/1_Drawing_and_Animation/2a/RemoveButton.qml 0
The \l{Image}{Image} element allows loading an image file for display. The source
specified is a URL, and in this case refers to a portable network graphics
file in a relative directory to where the QML file was loaded from.
Also new in this code is the use of anchors. In QML components can either
have their position and size specified explicitly using x, y, width
and height, or they can instead specify the size and position in relation
to either parent or sibling elements. The \l{Image}{Image} component uses
a combination of both styles. It has a fixed size, but specifies its
position to align to the right of its parent and for its vertical center
to align with the vertical center of its parent. Setting a property
by the identifier of a separate property binds them. This means
that if while running the example the position of the \l{Rectangle}{Rectangle} component's
vertical center changed, so to would the vertical center of
the \l{Image}{Image} component.
The parent value is a special identifier that always refers to the
parent component of a component.
Anchors are most useful when the size of items might change based on
the component state or contents. However they are limited in that they
must always refer to a parent or sibling component. See
\l{anchor-layout}{Anchor-based Layout} for more information on using
anchors in QML.
At this point the initial state of the RemoveButton is complete. A small
rounded rectangle with a trash icon. Next we will design the open
state for the button.
\image declarative-removebutton-open.png
This is a wider rectangle with two images and some text. The code to
draw this state of the button could be written as follows:
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/1_Drawing_and_Animation/3/RemoveButton.qml 0
The rectangle width is now wider by 200 pixels. Also the trashIcon has
been replaced. Normally we wouldn't
remove the trashIcon when developing an alternate state of the RemoveButton,
however since this is a tutorial its been done so that its easier to
understand the alternate state we are aiming for and how it relates to
transitioning between states.
We also introduce the \l{Text}{Text} element.
Left and Right anchors are specified in terms of the neighboring icons
because we want text to fill the space between the icons. This
means as the parent removeButton gets wider, so will the text component.
It also means that if we animate a width change on the removeButton,
any bindings, that is the values specified by an expression such as
\c{parent.left} will be evaluated and animated as well.
\section1 Defining States
When designing a component with multiple states, it should be developed
in the initial state and the changes that would be made specified
as an additional state. Its not normally possible to add new children
to an element when changing state
This means that all possible child components should be included
in the initial state, and those that should not be visible in the initial
state should have their opacity set to zero. Thus
for the RemoveButton we specify the starting size of the RemoveButton
and hide any items that should not initially be visible.
The code snippet below shows what the start of the duel state specification
might look like.
\code
Rectangle {
id: removeButton
width: 30
height: 30
color: "red"
radius: 5
Image {
id: trashIcon
width: 22
height: 22
anchors.right: parent.right
anchors.rightMargin: 4
anchors.verticalCenter: parent.verticalCenter
src: "../../shared/pics/trash.png"
opacity: 1
}
Image {
id: cancelIcon
width: 22
height: 22
anchors.right: parent.right
anchors.rightMargin: 4
anchors.verticalCenter: parent.verticalCenter
src: "../../shared/pics/cancel.png"
opacity: 0
}
\endcode
The code above includes components from both states of the RemoveButton,
but by setting opacity="0" for the cancelIcon it means that the
components of the second state won't be drawn yet.
The base state of a component always has an empty name, however new
states can be added that describe how a component and its children
should be changed. For the RemoveButton there is only one non-base state
required. In this tutorial we will name it the 'opened' state.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/1_Drawing_and_Animation/4/RemoveButton.qml states
In the opened state the width of the button itself changes from the base
width of 30 to the new width of 230. Also the opacity of the children
are changed so that the trash icon is now hidden and the other elements
are now visible.
\section1 Changing States
To trigger the change we will react to the 'clicked' signal of a
MouseRegion component.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/1_Drawing_and_Animation/4/RemoveButton.qml mouse region
MouseRegion components handle mouse actions within their geometry. This
geometry behaves the same way as painted components, such that children
cover their parents and later siblings will cover earlier siblings and
all the children of the earlier sibling, should they overlap.
When a component has a signal, such as clicked, the action for the signal
can be specified using \c{onSignalName}, as is done above. In this
case when the clicked signal is emitted by the MouseRegion component,
a function called \c{toggle()} is called. It might also have been written
\code
onClicked: { removeButton.state='opened' }
\endcode
However in this case we are using a function because it allows multiple
mouse regions to use the same functionality, and also makes it
easier to specify complex behavior in response to a signal.
An alternative would be to explicitly state the connection:
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/1_Drawing_and_Animation/4a/RemoveButton.qml mouse region
This will connect to the \c{clicked()} signal of the trashMouseRegion component
and execute the associated script.
The \c{toggle()} function is a new function specified as part of the remove
button element.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/1_Drawing_and_Animation/4/RemoveButton.qml script
Any QML component can have a set of resources specified. One of those
resources is any Script that might be needed. See the
\l{QtScript Module} for more information on how to write
script code in Qt.
It is possible to refer to identified QML components
within the script. Hence the function for our RemoveButton will check
if the state is already open to determine what the new state should be.
\section1 Animation
Currently the RemoveButton is functional, but snaps between our two states.
Fortunately making the transition between states smooth is very simple.
We only need one more bit of code at the end of our removeButton component.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/1_Drawing_and_Animation/5/RemoveButton.qml transition
All QML components have a transitions property. This describes how
properties of items within the component should change. In this case
we specify that if the x, width or opacity of the removeButton or its
children change due to a change in state, that they should take 200ms
to complete their transition.
\omit
TODO More on types of animation, e.g. ColorAnimation, Behaviors.
\endomit
In the next chapter we will show how we can use the remove button in
other QML components.
*/
/*!
\page tutorials-declarative-contacts-part2.html
\contentspage {Declarative UI Tutorial}{Contents}
\previouspage {tutorials/declarative/contacts/part1}{Chapter 1}
\nextpage {tutorials/declarative/contacts/part3}{Chapter 3}
\example tutorials/declarative/contacts/part2
\title Reusing QML Components
\tableofcontents
The second part of this tutorial covers how to reuse QML components and
have them interact with each other. The RemoveButton developed in the
previous chapter is intended to be part of a more complex control for
editing a field of our contact. This ContactField in turn is intended
to be used in a contact editing control.
\image declarative-reuse-3.png
\section1 Loading QML Components
Reusing the RemoveButton itself is very simple. When parsing a QML file
if a Component is referred to that isn't already in the system, Qt
will try to load it from a file of the same name with the ".qml" extension.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/1/ContactField.qml load
The above QML code will attempt to load the RemoveButton component from
a file with the name "RemoveButton.qml" from the following search paths.
\list
\o Any imported directories. These are listed at the start of the file using
\c { import "path" }.
\o the directory of the QML code file
\endlist
All the properties of the button are
accessible and can be overridden from defaults. The loaded component
can also refer to elements further up in the tree, so that code within
RemoveButton.qml could refer to the contactField component.
Only properties of the top level element in RemoveButton.qml are visible to
the contact field.
There are also two other ways to reuse components in QML. A component
can be reused from within the same QML file using Component and ComponentInstance
elements. The next code snippet produces three red rounded rectangles
within a large blue rectangle.
\image declarative-reuse-bluerect.png
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/1b/BlueRect.qml all
This can be useful when the component is not complex enough to justify its
own file. The third way to reuse components allows for delaying loading
of the QML until some later event. \l{Loader}{Loader} includes
a special child, item, which has its definition provided by the
contents of the source property of the loader.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/1a/ContactField.qml load
This last method is useful if the contents of a item need to change at
run time or if the initial complexity of the loaded QML needs to be
reduced in order to improve the time it takes to start the application. In
chapter three this method is used to improve performance of
scrolling through very large numbers of items.
Because of its simplicity, the first method is the recommended in most
cases and will be the focus of the remainder of this chapter.
\section1 Properties and Signals
The next task is to be able to control aspects of the RemoveButton from
the components that use it. In particular controlling how far it
expands and how it reacts when the user clicks on the confirm icon
of the remove button. When reusing a component in a separate QML file
only the attributes of the root element are visible. To allow controlling
attributes of child elements within an imported component we need to define
some properties and signals for the RemoveButton.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/2/RemoveButton.qml define properties and signals
The children of the remove button can use these properties and signals. The
opened state can now bind the expanded width to the expandedWidth property.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/2/RemoveButton.qml use width
Also when the confirm icon is clicked, as well as toggling the state it will
emit the confirmed signal of the RemoveButton component.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/2/RemoveButton.qml use signal
These properties and signals can also be accessed from the contact field the same
way standard system component properties and signals are accessed.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/2/ContactField.qml use properties and signals
Now when the remove button is expanded, it will expand to the width of the
contact field. Also when the user confirms the remove action, the
text section of the contact field will be cleared.
\section1 States
Its also possible to access the state of included components. The FieldText
component we will use in this tutorial is also been written specifically
for our contacts application. In
this case we want it to expand when editing. One way to do this would
be to anchor the field text component to the center of its parent and
then let its own width change push the remove button away, however that
would make it difficult to have the remove button also push the field
text to the left when the remove button expands. Instead we will anchor
the right edge of the field text to the left edge of the remove button
and use a state change in the contact field itself to move the
remove button and the field icon out of
view.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/3/ContactField.qml all
Apart from accessing the fieldText.state, the above code also uses the when
attribute of its own editingText state. This is an alternative to using
a signal to change state. When the value of the expression for the
when attribute changes, Qt will detect if the contactField needs to enter
that state. In the FieldText element a similar approach is used to fade
out the label of the FieldText when the user enters some text of their own.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/3/FieldText.qml behavior
\c{fieldText} is the enclosing component and \c{textEdit} is a TextEdit element
provided by Qt. In the QML code above, the opacity of the textLabel is
only 1 if the text for the textEdit is empty. This is a form of
short cut to using states for an element, useful if only one property
is changing as it is for the textLabel. To animate a property change is
similar to animating a state change. Using the Behavior element we can
specify how the property changes if it does change state, allowing for
a smooth transition.
\section1 Key and Mouse Focus
Setting focus to true on a component does not always mean
that the component has focus. This is due to the declarative nature
of QML, and can be affected by multiple components both indicating
focus to be true. At the time of writing this tutorial both key and mouse
focus handling are still being improved. Hence we will only lightly cover
the topic.
For an item to have key focus in QML it is required that:
\list
\o If there is a FocusScope ancestor of the component that it has focus as well.
\o That it is the most recent component within the focus realms descendent's
to receive focus
\endlist
The read-only property activeFocus can be used to determine whether a
component will receive key input. Any un-handled keys will be passed to
the components parent, which in turn will pass keys it doesn't handle up to its
own ancestors.
Some components such as ListView components are also FocusScope components, as they
handle focus among the child list items.
At this stage of the tutorial it is sufficient to use the setting of 'focus'
as we only have a list of line edits and only one should be active at any given time.
Currently if multiple contact fields were put into our contact editor,
any of the FieldText components could be clicked and opened, and
any of the RemoveButton components could be clicked and opened, all
at the same time. This leads to situations where the users actions
are ambiguous
\image declarative-reuse-focus.png
To counteract this we will add a property of the root element to indicate
when an element has 'grabbed' mouse interaction, preventing other
clickable elements from reacting.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/4/Contact.qml grab property
The code that we want to disable then simply needs to check this property before
acting.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/4/RemoveButton.qml grab
\note Handling Key and Mouse focus in QML is quite likely to change before
the Qt 4.6 release.
*/
/*!
\page tutorials-declarative-contacts-part3.html
\contentspage {Declarative UI Tutorial}{Contents}
\previouspage {tutorials/declarative/contacts/part2}{Chapter 2}
\example tutorials/declarative/contacts/part3
\title Models, Views and Delegates
\tableofcontents
In the previous chapters we designed a component to display and
edit a contact. The next step is to display a list of those contacts
and allow the user to expand individual contacts for editing.
As the previous elements will not be changed in this section, they have
been moved to a lib directory for this tutorial and the relevant
import path has been used.
\section1 Simple List View
Displaying lists requires three components. A model that holds the
data displayed, a delegate to indicate how elements are drawn and
a view to arrange the elements.
\image declarative-tutorial-list.gif
For the purposes of this tutorial we will be using an SQL query as our
data model. This can be declared in the resources section of
the parent item.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/3_Collections/1/ContactView.qml model
The SqlConnection component describes how to connect to the database in
much the same ways as the QSqlDatabase::addDatabase() function is used.
In this case an SQLite database is used as it can be connected to as a
file, reducing complexity in setting up a database server or credentials.
The SqlQuery component allows various forms of queries to be described.
When the query is a select statement, the component also acts as a model
allowing it to provide data to a ListView component. The query above
retrieves the fields recid, label, email and phone from a contacts table,
and orders the results by the label of the contact first, and then by
the recid for any contacts with equivalent labels.
The ListView component is suitable for displaying models and is declared
much like any other QML component. The ListView component also has
a delegate property that defines how to construct components for items in the list.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/3_Collections/1/ContactView.qml delegate
Unlike a child element, this describes a template on how to build the component
for each element, much in the same way that components are loaded from
files such as RemoveButton.qml. The are constructed or destroyed as items
scroll into our out of the visible area of the list.
The entire view component will look like:
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/3_Collections/1/ContactView.qml view
This gives us a list of contacts that the user can flick through.
\section1 Animating Delegates
The next step is to allow the user to click on a contact to edit the
contact. We will take advantage of QML to open a Contact component
in the list rather than as a new dialog or view. This is very
similar to how the contents of the FieldText and RemoveButton components
are swapped in and out.
\image declarative-tutorial-list-open.gif
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/3_Collections/2/ContactView.qml components
The first step is to have two children of our delegate component that can
be swapped between. The plain Text component and the Contact component built
in the previous chapters. We also add a MouseRegion that can be clicked upon
to change the state of the delegate component.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/3_Collections/2/ContactView.qml states
This defines the open state of the delegate. It changes the height of the delegate
component to that of the whole list view, pushing the other items off each end of
the list. It sets the listview's scroll viewportY of the ListView to the
y value of the delegate so that the top of the delegate matches the top of the list view.
The next step is to lock the list view. This prevents the user being able to flick
the list view. The final to properties that are set should
be familiar from previous chapters, setting the opacity of the items such
that the new item is visible and the old item hidden.
We then add a transition so that this becomes animated:
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/3_Collections/2/ContactView.qml transitions
This allows the user to click on an item to enter the open state. Elsewhere on our
contact view we add a button so that the user can leave the detailed view of the contact.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/3_Collections/2/ContactView.qml button
And connect it's clicked value to some script to set the state of the delegate
back to its default state.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/3_Collections/2/ContactView.qml connections
Something worth noting at this point is that every delegate created has this connection.
It is important to check whether the delegate is the one in the open state, and
taking some effort to ensure only one is, before acting on the signal from the button.
\section1 Performance Considerations
We have now made a contact application that can view a list of contacts, open one,
and close it again. Its now time to take a moment and consider the implications
of a list view delegate. It is created for each and every item in the list,
and while the list cleans up after itself and only has delegate components constructed
for visible items and any single point of animation, the list can scroll very quickly.
This means potentially thousands of delegate components will be constructed and
destroyed when the user is flicking through the list.
Its important then to try and minimize the complexity of the delegate. This
can be done by delaying the loading of the component. By using the qml property
of the \l{Item}{Item} component, we can delay building the Contact.qml item until the user
attempts to open the list.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/3_Collections/3/ContactView.qml setting qml
\l{Loader}{Loader} has a source property that represents the filename for the contents of
a special item child of the \l{Loader}{Loader}. By setting the source property of the Details
component on clicking the mouse region, the more complex component isn't loaded
until needed. The down side about this though is the properties of Contact
cannot be set until the item is loaded. This requires using the Bind element.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/3_Collections/3/ContactView.qml binding
Unlike binding a value to the property of a component directly, the Bind element
allows both the target and the property set to themselves be to dynamic values.
This means that when the source property is set, it will change the
item property of the Details component. This in turn triggers the Bind
elements to set the required properties of the item, which is now
an instance of the Contact component.
*/
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