Marble/MarbleDesigner

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Marble Qt Designer Plugin: Look Mom, No Code!

Tutorial Series	Marble Widget Plugin for Qt Designer
Previous	Qt Designer
What's Next	n/a
Further Reading	n/a

The Marble Widget Plugin for Qt Designer

Compiling the MarbleWidget Plugin

The Marble Widget is also offered as a Qt Designer plugin. If you compile Marble yourself you probably need to enable the compilation of the Qt Designer plugin:

If your source directory is "~/marble" and your build directory is "~/marble_build" then you can enable compilation of the Qt Designer plugin via the cmake call:

<syntaxhighlight lang="text"> cmake -DQTONLY=OFF -DWITH_DESIGNER_PLUGIN=ON ../marble

Choose "-DQTONLY=ON" as a parameter if you don't have KDE installed. Once you have compiled Marble using "make" you can install everything using "make install". This should install the file

<syntaxhighlight lang="text"> MarbleWidgetPlugin.so

into Qt's designer plugin directory (please check this in case things don't work out). If you compile the Qt-Only version then the file name is called libMarbleWidgetPlugin.so.

Once you start Qt Designer you should spot a new "Marble Desktop Globe" category in the widget box on the left:

On Windows you must keep in mind that your MarbleWidget.dll must be in the PATH when the designer executable is called. Otherwise the marble plugins will result in a loading error.

Using the MarbleWidget Plugin

You can use this Marble Widget just like all other widgets inside Qt Designer: Once you have started Qt Designer you can choose a new form from the ready-made templates (e.g. a QWidget). Now you can just drag and drop the Marble Widget from the widget box onto your form:

Alternatively we also provide other widget plugins that allow controlling the Marble Widget: e.g. the navigation widget plugin and the latitude-longitude widget plugin.

The map properties of the Marble Widget can be adjusted in the Property Editor on the right: all properties get assigned and displayed immediately on the map without having to press the "Preview" menu entry.

There are two ready-made examples available inside the example directory of the Marble source code:

<syntaxhighlight lang="text"> marble/examples/example1.ui marble/examples/example2.ui

The file example2.ui nicely demonstrate how signals and slots work with the MarbleWidget:

You can preview the widget by choosing "Preview" from the "Form" menu. Inside the preview it's possible to pan and zoom the map. Of course the signal-slot connections can be tested inside the preview as well.