Beyond 2.6

Herbert Thoma herbert.thoma at iis.fraunhofer.de
Sat Feb 16 15:30:20 EST 2013



Am 16.02.2013 17:06, schrieb John Ralls:
> 
> On Feb 16, 2013, at 5:06 AM, Herbert Thoma <herbert.thoma at iis.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> 
>> forgot CC list ...
>>
>> Am 15.02.2013 21:06, schrieb John Ralls:
>>>>> Why hard to say? MVC isn't exactly cutting-edge design. It's been
>>>>> around since 1988 and 7 years later GoF thought it so well-understood
>>>>> that it's the "how to use patterns" example in the introduction.
>>>>
>>>> Well, the point is that every time the user leaves a field you need to
>>>> parse all the input fields and process them in the controller/model as
>>>> part of the validation, even if the user hasn't asked to 'save' yet.
>>>>
>>>> I guess it all depends on your controller APIs.  (In the RoR world this
>>>> is harder to do, because the view is in the browser, but the model and
>>>> controllers are on the server -- and there is no "verify this model" API
>>>> in the controller.  At least not directly.  The client-side-validations
>>>> gem adds some support for this).
>>>
>>>
>>> We already do that for the account type listbox: We connect to a signal
>>> (don't know offhand which one) in the parent accounts GtkTreeView that tells
>>> us that the user has selected a parent account, retrieve that account, run
>>> xaccAccountGetCompatibleTypes() on it, and populate the account type listbox
>>> with the result.  
>>>
>>> That's a pretty standard way for UI View objects to communicate with their
>>> controller objects, though there are others. Wx has a specific "Validator"
>>> class that lets you register a callback to test control input as it happens.
>>> It also has a signals mechanism (which they rather confusingly call Events)
>>> to support other interactivity needs. Qt is well-known for its "signals and slots"
>>> feature, which I imagine is used for this purpose much like Gtk's signals are, but
>>> I've never written anything for Qt so I don't actually know.
>>
>> Yes, you can use signals and slots this way. I personally like Qt very much. For me
>> it is the best GUI toolkit I have ever worked with (I worked with Motif, MFC,
>> GTK and Qt, but always only small projects or patches to GnuCash).
>>
>> However, I would still be hesitant to use signals and slots in the engine. Earlier
>> in this thread it was stated that the engine depends heavily on Glib and that this
>> is bad for portability. Do we want to replace the Glib dependency with a Qt
>> dependency?
>>
> 
> See Geert's and my responses about where the "slots" go.

OK, thanks. I think I got it. I only just know enough C++ to be dangerous ...

> Does Qt have another mechanism for validating user input as he types? How does it handle spell checking? ("Magic" is a reasonable answer here: I know in detail how Gtk handles spell checking because it's an add-on that I've contributed to, but Apple handles it inside the toolkit so that application devs needn't do anything about it.)

Qt has a QValidator class. http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qvalidator.html
I don't think that this is used for spell checking, though.

 Herbert.

> Regards,
> John Ralls
> 
> 
> 


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