Qt Signal Slot Custom Class

Demonstrates multi-thread programming using Qt.

Qt Connect Signal Slot
How Qt Signal And Slots Works

The class in Qt responsible for custom types is QMetaType. To make the type known to this class, we invoke the QDECLAREMETATYPE macro on the class in the header file where it is defined. The receivers of signals are called Slots in Qt terminology. A number of standard slots are provided on Qt classes to allow you to wire together different parts of your application. However, you can also use any Python function as a slot, and therefore receive the message yourself.

Contents:

Overview

In the Custom Type Example, we showed how to integrate custom types with the meta-object system, enabling them to be stored in QVariant objects, written out in debugging information and used in signal-slot communication.

Qt Connect Signal Slot

In this example, we create a new value class, Block, and register it with the meta-object system to enable us to send instances of it between threads using queued signals and slots.

The Block Class

The Block class is similar to the Message class described in the Custom Type Example. It provides the default constructor, copy constructor and destructor in the public section of the class that the meta-object system requires. It describes a colored rectangle.

We will still need to register it with the meta-object system at run-time by calling the qRegisterMetaType() template function before we make any signal-slot connections that use this type. Even though we do not intend to use the type with QVariant in this example, it is good practice to also declare the new type with Q_DECLARE_METATYPE().

The implementation of the Block class is trivial, so we avoid quoting it here.

The Window Class

We define a simple Window class with a public slot that accepts a Block object. The rest of the class is concerned with managing the user interface and handling images.

The Window class also contains a worker thread, provided by a RenderThread object. This will emit signals to send Block objects to the window's addBlock(Block) slot.

The parts of the Window class that are most relevant are the constructor and the addBlock(Block) slot.

The constructor creates a thread for rendering images, sets up a user interface containing a label and two push buttons that are connected to slots in the same class.

How Qt Signal And Slots Works

In the last of these connections, we connect a signal in the RenderThread object to the addBlock(Block) slot in the window.

The rest of the constructor simply sets up the layout of the window.

The addBlock(Block) slot receives blocks from the rendering thread via the signal-slot connection set up in the constructor:

We simply paint these onto the label as they arrive.

The RenderThread Class

The RenderThread class processes an image, creating Block objects and using the sendBlock(Block) signal to send them to other components in the example.

The constructor and destructor are not quoted here. These take care of setting up the thread's internal state and cleaning up when it is destroyed.

Processing is started with the processImage() function, which calls the RenderThread class's reimplementation of the QThread::run() function:

Ignoring the details of the way the image is processed, we see that the signal containing a block is emitted in the usual way:

Each signal that is emitted will be queued and delivered later to the window's addBlock(Block) slot.

Registering the Type

In the example's main() function, we perform the registration of the Block class as a custom type with the meta-object system by calling the qRegisterMetaType() template function:

This call is placed here to ensure that the type is registered before any signal-slot connections are made that use it.

The rest of the main() function is concerned with setting a seed for the pseudo-random number generator, creating and showing the window, and setting a default image. See the source code for the implementation of the createImage() function.

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