Development/Tutorials/Developing Qt4 Applications using Qt Designer and Ruby on Kubuntu

Developing Qt4 Applications using Qt Designer and Ruby on Kubuntu Jaunty 9.04

Introduction

Part of Qt's great power lies in the fact that you get a top notch GUI design kit to please the most avid designer as well as an elegant development framework to keep the application coders happy. In this article we will take you through both sides of this equation as we show you how to create a small application which displays a list of items (pieces of text) and let's you move these items up and down via drag'n'drop. You'll learn how to

Install the packages you need to get started
Draw a GUI with Qt Designer
Relate the GUI to the code that runs underneath it through subclassing
Programmatically control the display of widgets on screen
Do some simple debugging using ruby-debug

Ground breaking in the extreme!

Note

These instructions are tested with Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). They have also been tested successfully with Ubuntu 9.04. If you are a user of another distro, you are invited to post how you installed it on your distro. This will be very useful to other users!

Install the appropriate packages

From a command line terminal run
sudo apt-get install libkorundum4-ruby1.8 sudo apt-get install qt4-designer sudo apt-get install libqt4-ruby1.8-dev sudo apt-get install libqt4-ruby1.8-examples sudo apt-get install qt4-doc qt4-doc-html qt4-demos qt4-dev-tools

Create a simple Form with Qt4 Designer

Create a folder on disk for your project, for example, my_first_project
Start up Qt4 Designer

Select Qt 4 Designer from the Applications->Programming menu or...
From a command line terminal run designer-qt4

The default form is a Dialog with Buttons Right. Stick with that and click Create
Drag a List Widget from the Item Widgets (Item-Based) selection of widgets on the left onto the form. Be careful NOT to choose the List View from the Item Views (Model-Based)
Right-click the List Widget that is now dragged on the form

Select Edit Items
Click the green plus icon on the left to add an item
Enter the text: First line
Click the green plus icon on the left to add an item
Enter the text: Second line
Click OK to finish editing items

In the Property Editor on the right, scroll down to the section QAbstractItemView
Keep scrolling down a little more to the Property DragDropMode and change it's value to internal. This will let us move items up and down in the list easily
Save what we've done by selecting Save As in the File Menu

Navigate to the folder you created earlier, my_first_project
Choose the filename dashboard.ui for your file and click save
This file contains and XML representation of the form you just created

If you want to take a quick look at your form select Preview from the Form menu
But we're done with GUI stuff now! Let's get hacking...

Creating the basic application structure

Now that we've got a user interface, we need to run a command (rbuic4) that creates a Ruby class that we can use based on the interface
From the command line terminal

Navigate to the my_first_project folder you created earlier using the cd command
Run the command rbuic4 dashboard.ui -x -o dashboard_ui.rb
For instant gratification run the command ruby dashboard_ui.rb
Woaa!!! You should see your beautiful form before your very eyes. But when the excitement dies down, be aware that if you were to add any code to your dashboard_ui.rb file it would get blown away every time we run rbuic4 on this file to pick up the latest changes we made to the UI using Qt4 Designer. But it needn't be this way...

Note

The -x bit of the rbuic4 command says to create a little stub (like a main function in C/C++ or public static void main in Java) that kicks off the application. Otherwise your application would have no entry point.

The -o dashboard_ui.rb bit of the command says dump the resulting ruby code into a file called dashboard_ui.rb

We need to rerun this command every time we change the form using Qt4 Designer. Usually we won't add the -x flag

Move application startup code into a main.rb file

Create a new file in the my_first_project folder called main.rb
Move the following code from the dashboard_ui.rb file to main.rb

if $0 == __FILE__

   a = Qt::Application.new(ARGV)
   u = Ui_Dialog.new
   w = Qt::Dialog.new
   u.setupUi(w)
   w.show
   a.exec

end

Inside the main.rb file, there is no need for the opening if $0 == __FILE__' line (and it's enclosing end statement). This is because main.rb is going to be the entry point to our application. So you can safely remove those two lines.

Note

So what is the if $0 == __FILE__ line all about?

If the code within the if statement is in a file that is included by a separate top level program then this condition will be false. The code inside the if statement will not be executed.

Note: you can always use rbuic4 with the -x option even for a production program - just that you will have a test hook in there if you ever just want to test the UI.

We move the inclusion of the Qt framework (require 'Qt4' - or it may be require 'Qt' on your system) from the dashboard_ui.rb file to main.rb

We change the line u.setupUi(w) to u.setup_ui(w)

Note

To some, the latter is more Rubyesque. If you look in the autogenerated file dashboard_ui.rb, you will see that the function sampleUi() is wrapped by another function sample_ui().

Again for Rubyesque-ness, we change Ui_Dialog.new to Ui::Dialog.new

This is just aesthetics. Syntactic sugar, but important syntactic sugar nonetheless!

This gives us a main.rb file that looks like

require 'Qt4' require 'dashboard_ui'

a = Qt::Application.new(ARGV)

u = Ui::Dialog.new w = Qt::Dialog.new u.setup_ui(w) w.show a.exec

Note

It is fine to have more than one require 'Qt4' in your code, they just get ignored after the first one.

Ok, so where are we at now? Well if you run ruby main.rb from the command line your dinky little dialog should appear. The way we are using the dialog in our application is called the Direct Approach. For more information (which is beyond the scope of this article) check out http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/designer-using-a-component.html to see what the different approaches are. That article is very C++ based but you should get the gist of what is going on. But basically a lot of the important work is being done in the main.rb file; this means that we don't have much control over our widgets programmatically.

In the next section, we will switch to using the Single Inheritance Approach. Then we'll show you how to programmatically populate the List Widget on application startup. Fasten your seatbelts!

The Single Inheritance Approach - Separating generated code from our 'real' code

Ok, everything you learned is a lie! Well, not really, but definitely you'll want to do take the Single Inheritance Approach over the Direct Approach.

Subclassing the dashboard_ui.rb file

In Qt4, this is the primary way to separate autogenerated from code from our own logic. Using a text editor create a new file in your my_first_project folder called dashboard.rb with the following contents. (Note: For the rest of this article be careful to pay attention as to whether we are talking about dashboard_ui.rb or dashboard.rb). The comments should explain what's going on.

We pull in the file containing the class which consists of generated code

require 'dashboard_ui'

We inherit from Qt:Dialog as it gives us access to User Interface
functionality such as connecting slots and signals

class Dashboard < Qt::Dialog

   # We are then free to put our own code into this class without fear
   # of it being overwritten. Here we add a initialize function which
   # can be used to customise how the form looks on startup. The method
   # initialize() is a constructor in Ruby

   def initialize(parent = nil)

      # Widgets in Qt can be optionally be children of other widgets.
      # That's why we accept parent as a parameter

      # This super call causes the constructor of the base class (Qt::Widget)
      # to be called, shepherding on the parent argument

      super(parent)

      # We'll be putting some code here real soon...

end

end

Giving our Dashboard class the power!

Next we need to move the creation of the actual dialog out of main.rb and into the dashboard.rb to make the Dashboard class responsible for managing the widget. This is a core concept to understand. At the same time, we make the following changes to the main.rb file

We change require 'dashboard_ui' to require 'dashboard'

Note

Why do we change the require statement? Because we are using the Dashboard class that we have defined and control rather than the Ui::Dialog class autogenerated by rbuic4

Create an instance of Dashboard rather than Ui::Dialog and rename variables to be more meaningful
Call the show method on the Dashboard object rather than some separate Qt::Dialog object

Note

Why can we call the show method on the Dashboard object? Because of the subclassing we are implementing, Dashboard now is a Qt::Dialog object!

Finally, we move the setup_ui function call and the creation of a Ui::Dialog instance from main.rb to our Dashboard class in dashboard.rb. As we do so we rename variables to be a little more meaningful. Here's what main.rb should look like when you're done...

require 'Qt4' require 'dashboard'

a = Qt::Application.new(ARGV) dashboard = Dashboard.new dashboard.show a.exec

And here's what dashboard.rb should look like when you're done...

We pull in the file containing the class which consists of generated code

require 'dashboard_ui'

We inherit from Qt:Dialog as it gives us access to User Interface
functionality such as connecting slots and signals

class Dashboard < Qt::Dialog

   # We are then free to put our own code into this class without fear
   # of it being overwritten. Here we add a initialize function which
   # can be used to customise how the form looks on startup. The method
   # initialize() is a constructor in Ruby

   def initialize(parent = nil)

      # Widgets in Qt can optionally be children of other widgets.
      # That's why we accept parent as a parameter

      # This super call causes the constructor of the base class (Qt::Widget)
      # to be called, shepherding on the parent argument

      super(parent)

      # The Dashboard class we are in holds presentation logic and exists
      # to 'manage' the dialog widget we created in Qt Designer earlier.
      # An instance of this dialog widget is created and stored in @ui variable

      @ui = Ui::Dialog.new

      # Calling setup_ui causes the dialog widget to be initialised with the
      # defaults you may have specified in Qt Designer. For example, it 
      # - populates the 'First Line' and 'Second Line' items in the List Widget
      # - sets the drag drop mode to 'Internal'
      # - and much much more. Peer into the dashboard_ui.rb if you want to the
      #   full gory details

      @ui.setup_ui(self)

end

end

Programmatically control how the List Widget is populated on app startup

Now currently all the code to insert the items into the Item List is controlled in the autogenerated file dashboard_ui.rb. Let's take the power back!

From the the setupUi function in dashboard_ui.rb file to the bottom of our own dashboard.rb file's initialize function, move the lines

Qt::ListWidgetItem.new(@listWidget) Qt::ListWidgetItem.new(@listWidget)

From the the retranslateUi function in dashboard_ui.rb file to the bottom of our dashboard.rb file's initialize function, move the lines

@listWidget.item(0).text = Qt::Application.translate("Dialog", "First Line", nil, Qt::Application::UnicodeUTF8) @listWidget.item(1).text = Qt::Application.translate("Dialog", "Second Line", nil, Qt::Application::UnicodeUTF8)

NB: Use @ui.listwidget in instead of just @listwidget in the lines that you move. This is because @ui is the variable that contains the Dialog which in turn contains the List Widget.

This gives us a dashboard.rb file that looks as follows...

We pull in the file containing the class which consists of generated code

require 'dashboard_ui'

We inherit from Qt:Dialog as it gives us access to User Interface
functionality such as connecting slots and signals

class Dashboard < Qt::Dialog

   # We are then free to put our own code into this class without fear
   # of it being overwritten. Here we add a initialize function which
   # can be used to customise how the form looks on startup. The method
   # initialize() is a constructor in Ruby

   def initialize(parent = nil)

      # Widgets in Qt can optionally be children of other widgets.
      # That's why we accept parent as a parameter

      # This super call causes the constructor of the base class (Qt::Widget)
      # to be called, shepherding on the parent argument

      super(parent)

      # The Dashboard class we are in holds presentation logic and exists
      # to 'manage' the dialog widget we created in Qt Designer earlier.
      # An instance of this dialog widget is created and stored in @ui variable

      @ui = Ui::Dialog.new

      # Calling setup_ui causes the dialog widget to be initialised with the
      # defaults you may have specified in Qt Designer. For example, it 
      # - populates the 'First Line' and 'Second Line' items in the List Widget
      # - sets the drag drop mode to 'Internal'
      # - and much much more. Peer into the dashboard_ui.rb if you want to the
      #   full gory details

      @ui.setup_ui(self)

      # As promised...

      Qt::ListWidgetItem.new(@ui.listWidget)
      Qt::ListWidgetItem.new(@ui.listWidget)

      #And also...

      @ui.listWidget.item(0).text = Qt::Application.translate("Dialog", "First Line", nil, Qt::Application::UnicodeUTF8)
      @ui.listWidget.item(1).text = Qt::Application.translate("Dialog", "Second Line", nil, Qt::Application::UnicodeUTF8)

end

end

Debugging your application

You should now be able to run ruby main.rb and see you're lovely form appear. Try to drag the first line and second line up and down. Not bad, eh?

One last thing if you need to do some simple debugging on your app, make sure that you have the ruby-debug gem installed (sudo gem install ruby-debug) and stick the line debugger in your source code anywhere you want to put a breakpoint. Then instead of the ruby command run rdebug main.rb and this will drop you into a nifty command line debugger. Initially it will be at line 1 in your source file but if you type c it will bring you to your breakpoint. For more on using command line debugging see ruby-debug in 30 seconds (we don't need no stinkin' GUI!).

Ya, sure we don't need no stinkin' GUI! But don't tell those Qt guys - they seem to produce quite nice ones!

Useful Links and Articles

One of the best ways to learn is to look at some Qt examples in Ruby. Download the latest qt4-qtruby zip (something like qt4-qtruby-2.0.3.tgz) from http://rubyforge.org/projects/korundum and check out the ruby/qtruby/examples directory
http://zetcode.com/tutorials/qtrubytutorial contains a list of online Qt tutorials with Ruby
Check out the online Qt4 Designer Manual to really nail the art of designing GUI's with Qt4 Designer at http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/designer-manual.html

Tips of the Day - Understanding class naming conventions in Qt4 documentation

Most Qt reference documentation is written with the C++ flavour of Qt in mind - for example the wealth of information available at http://qt.nokia.com/doc/4.5/index.html. It will talk of things like QFileDialog, QDir and so on. You need to release that when you use those framework classes in Qt Ruby you need to use Qt::FileDialog, Qt::Dir and so on. So don't forget to change that leading Q on the class names into a Qt::. A bit of mental jiggery-pokery to keep you on your toes!
We have no maximize, minimize titler bar buttons in our little app. That's because the type of window in our application in a QDialog. If you want to have max and min buttons easily in your application's title bar use a QMainWindow instead. It's a good exercise for you to try and figure out how to do this.