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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.
**
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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}
\o \l{tutorials/declarative/contacts/part4}{Other Tricks}
\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. The file 1_Drawing_and_Animation.qml
loads and displays each of the five stages of this tutorial in a single
window. For now you don't need to worry about the contents of
1_Drawing_and_Animation.qml.
\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.png
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.
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 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. Properties
can either be declared as XML attributes or as children of the
component element.
The rectangle component is one of the more simple QML components. Apart
from the properties all QML components share, it 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
\omit
For more information on the Rect element, see: TODO
\endomit
There are also a number of properties all QML components share. To see
a full description of the base QML item, see {QFxItem}. 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
All items have properties to handle their position on the screen, size,
clipping, rotation, scale and layout in regards to other elements. In
the current example width and height refer to how large to draw the
rectangle. The identifier allows other components to refer to the
identified component.
Another important property of a component is its children. All components
have a list of children. When drawing, first any components earlier
siblings are drawn, then the component, then any of the components children.
\section1 Layout
The next step of the tutorial adds an image over the rectangle.
\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> tag isn't used because the default property of the
Rect component is its children. Some elements don't often 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 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 elements either parent or sibling elements. The 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. The braces "{}" are
used to indicate that the value is not a static value, but instead a
binding to an expression. In this case it binds to the parent
element, which is a special identifier that always refers to the
parent component of a component. The removeButton identifier can
be used interchangeably with parent in this case, however it must
always be a parent or sibling. Because of this its most common to
use the parent identifier as it makes later refactoring of code easier.
Anchors are most useful when the size of items might change based on
the component state or contents.
\omit
See TODO for full list of anchor properties.
\endomit
At this point the initial state of the RemoveButton is complete. A small
rounded rectangle with a trash icon. The component also needs a
description of its open state:
\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 with is now wider by 200 pixels. Also the trashIcon has
been replaced with the confirm state children. 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 Text element, which is used to display read only
text. \omit see {Text} for more information on the text element \endomit
Because we want text to fill the space between the icons, rather than
a fixed with the left and right anchors are specified instead. 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 a braced expression such as
"{parent.left}" will be evaluated and animated as well.
\section1 Defining States
When designing a component with multiple states, it should be developed
with the initial state and the changes that would be made specified
as an additional state. Its not possible to add new children to an
element when changing state, only changing the properties of existing
children. 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
Rect {
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 on<SignalName>, as is done above. In this
case when the clicked signal is emitted by the MouseRegion component,
a function called 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.
The 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
{QtScript Module}{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 function, 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.
\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 run directory
\o The run directory + "/qml"
\o the directory of the QML code file
\o the directory of the QML code file + "/qml"
\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. However only
properties of the top level element in RemoveButton.qml are visible to
the contact field. In order to allow contact field to modify how wide
the remove button will be when opened we need to add a property to the
remove button.
\section1 Properties and Signals
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/2/RemoveButton.qml define properties and signals
These properties and signals are accessed from the contact field the same
way standard system components are accessed.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/2/RemoveButton.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. When creating a
component that does have children out of its own
bounds its important to consider whether the item should be clipped,
which is done above with \c{clip: true}.
\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, as was the RemoveButton component. 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.
So 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/RemoveButton.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/3_Reuse/2/FieldText.qml behavior
fieldText is the enclosing component and textEdit is a TextEdit element
provided by Qt. In the QML code above, the opacity of the textLabel is
only 1 if there is 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.
The fieldText element also handles changes to the text using the
onValueChanged attribute when specifying properties.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/3/FieldText.qml value change
Because the user needs to be able to edit text in the text edit, it
shouldn't be simply bound to the text property of the FieldText component.
However if a component using the FieldText component sets the text
property of the FieldText component it should in turn set the text
of the text edit.
\section1 Key and Mouse Focus
Unlike in Qt 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.
Normally in QML this is handled by FocusRealm components. A focus realm
is a sort of cut off point for determining focus. If a FocusRealm does
not have focus then any children of it won't be able to get focus even
if they do set focus to true. If your component has multiple child
components that could gain focus ensure that they are guarded by FocusRealm
component, and add code to handle which focus realms have focus
at that level. The alternative and approach done at this stage in
the tutorial is to only have one component set focus to true at a 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. We would like this behavior to be some what modal
instead, encouraging the user to either accept or cancel the current
action before moving onto a new action.
In the tutorial we do this with a property of our top level component
to handle whether we are in this state or not.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/4/Contact.qml grab property
And in the code where we want to check or avoid allowing mouse interaction.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/2_Reuse/4/RemoveButton.qml grab
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}
\nextpage {tutorials/declarative/contacts/part4}{Chapter 4}
\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
name space 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.
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. However since it might have any number
of child items in the list, it has a property that defines how to construct
components for items when displayed.
\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 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.
.image.
\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.
\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 lists views scroll yPosition 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, meaning while in this state the delegate will continue to
fill the ListView's visible area. 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 transition
This allows the user to click on an item to enter the open state.
.image.
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 connection
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 flipping 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 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
Each item has a qml property that represents the filename for the contents of
a special qmlItem child of the Item. By setting the qml 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
properties of an item.
\snippet declarative/tutorials/contacts/3_Collections/3/ContactView.qml binding
The Bind properties bind a value to another component, however the target of
this binding can be changed, unlike when setting the properties of a component
directly. This means that when the qml property is set, it will change the
qmlItem property of the Details component. This in turn triggers the Bind
elements to set the required properties of the qmlItem, which is now
an instance of the Contact component.
*/
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