Book Image

Application Development with Qt Creator - Third Edition

By : Lee Zhi Eng, Ray Rischpater
Book Image

Application Development with Qt Creator - Third Edition

By: Lee Zhi Eng, Ray Rischpater

Overview of this book

Qt is a powerful development framework that serves as a complete toolset for building cross-platform applications, helping you reduce development time and improve productivity. Completely revised and updated to cover C++17 and the latest developments in Qt 5.12, this comprehensive guide is the third edition of Application Development with Qt Creator. You'll start by designing a user interface using Qt Designer and learn how to instantiate custom messages, forms, and dialogues. You'll then understand Qt's support for multithreading, a key tool for making applications responsive, and the use of Qt's Model-View-Controller (MVC) to display data and content. As you advance, you'll learn to draw images on screen using Graphics View Framework and create custom widgets that interoperate with Qt Widgets. This Qt programming book takes you through Qt Creator's latest features, such as Qt Quick Controls 2, enhanced CMake support, a new graphical editor for SCXML, and a model editor. You'll even work with multimedia and sensors using Qt Quick, and finally develop applications for mobile, IoT, and embedded devices using Qt Creator. By the end of this Qt book, you'll be able to create your own cross-platform applications from scratch using Qt Creator and the C++ programming language.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
7
Section 2: Advanced Features
12
Section 3: Practical Matters

Creating the Qt application

Our calculator has a button for each operation. While we could make each button a separate rectangle and MouseArea, it's far easier to make a single QML button that encapsulates the behavior of a button, including the change in appearance when you press on it, the placement of the button label, and so forth.

Create a new QML file by right-clicking on the project and choosing Add New..., and then, from the Qt items, choose QML File (Qt Quick 2). The button is a Rectangle object that contains a second Rectangle object, a Text label for the button, and a MouseArea object that handles button clicks. Name the file Button.qml, and edit it so that it reads as follows:

import QtQuick 2.12 
 
Rectangle { 
    id: button 
 
    width: 64 
    height: 64 
    property alias operation: buttonText.text 
    signal clicked 
 
    color: "green" 
...