2.5.17 Nokia Qt

Qt provides Views and associated Models, who are either tabular or hierarchical in nature. The framework also provides derived classes for Views, called Widgets. Widgets combine View and Model in a single class, allowing to store data directly into the view. This approach loses flexibility and ease of reuse of the data contents, but it can be convenient for some specific cases (for example, if you want to control addition and removal directly on the widget). Qt has delegates, that are associated to views. Delegates are responsible for handling controller tasks, and in addition control rendering and editing of these views. A delegate renders data into the view with the paint() method, and creates editors for the data with createEditor(). Default Delegates are installed on every view. The model contains data classified in roles. Some roles are purely data oriented, while other roles (FontRole) are view-level information. The model is therefore responsible for influencing the visual appearance of thje view through the Role mechanism. Of course, this mechanism can also be implemented by a specialized delegate who translates the Data semantic into visual semantic.

FIXME: For example, the QListView is a MV counterpart of QListWidget. There’s no controller in Qt, it doesn’t need any. In practice, Qt is a Model Delegate Editor design, except that the Delegate is called View, and the Editor is called Delegate. Such is life.

MVC model: modification through slots. Notification via signals.

Emitting before changing the data in the model, to track changes. But careful if the calling code is in another thread.

Qt model sort of a value model, but provides both visual and business data. The data structure is flexible to accommodate tabular and tree data on the same model structure.

Specialized models provide access to specific data (e.g. sql table, filesystem directory). Views are oblivious of the data provider as long as it fulfills the AbstractModel interface.

directory = QDirModel()
table = QTreeView()
tree.setModel(directory)
tree.setRootIndex(directory.index("/")

Model indexes are created on the model, acting as a factory. Indexes can mutate as new elements are added or removed. A Persistent index is available to refer to a specific entry regardless of modifications to the model.

Model defines row, column and parent. Views don’t necessarily use all the degrees of freedom. For example, a table may not need the parent, or a listView may not need the column, but the treeview needs all of them

The view requests only the data that it needs to show. This can save considerable time, and allows the model to do caching strategies or pre-fetching.

Qt also provides sort/filter (Pipe).

Model is a Presentation model.

Complex application models need to be adapted into Qt models if needed. In a sense, the Qt model is an adaptor to a data representation (both visual and business) that is appreciated by the Views provided by qt. With more complex views, or models, the Qt mechanism breaks down, because it’s finalized at a very specific data organization and visualization mechanism.

Provides the following Models

QStringListModel: Stores a list of strings QStandardItemModel: Stores arbitrary hierarchical items QFileSystemModel: Encapsulate the local file system QSqlQueryModel: Encapsulate an SQL result set QSqlTableModel: Encapsulates an SQL table QSqlRelationalTableModel: Encapsulates an SQL table with foreign keys QSortFilterProxyModel: Sorts and/or filters another model

QAbstractItemModel

and the following Views

QColumnView, QHeaderView, QListView, QTableView, and QTreeView. QAbstractItemView

The Qt MVC is simple and aimed at specific data representation and visualization. It’s not a general framework for MVC.

Delegates:

Factories for editors. createEditor() method can be reimplemented to return a specific widget that can edit a given cell in the model. It also has the gateway routines model->editor and editor->model for the data transit: setEditorData and setModelData. They are called at the beginning of the edit and at the end. It also provides the rendering logic for the element: method paint()