Development/Tutorials/Plasma4/GettingStarted..Some More

Development/Tutorials/Plasma/GettingStarted..SomeMore

Creating your first Plasmoid..Some more

Tutorial Series	Plasma Tutorial
Previous	C++, Qt, KDE4 development environment, Development/Tutorials/Plasma/GettingStarted
What's Next
Further Reading	CMake

Abstract

For the most part, I will skip the prelude and assume that you already know how to make the CMake file, to build, and to test your Plasmoid. If you need to refer back to the previous tutorial, feel free. This tutorial is covering some more material, most of it's pretty basic but hey, that's what tutorials are for ;-)

As of the time of this writing, the Plasma constructors for widgets tend to be from what I see (in general), lesser than their Qt base classes. This kind of threw me off, like pushButton->setIcon (I think).

Feel free to add anything you want, there's certainly not enough here :'(

I left it named "Tutorial1" just because it's easier/no point for it to be otherwise/I'm lazy.

The header file

This is the example header file. Comments have been added in the code for clarity.

plasma-tutorial1.h // These are include guards, we (all over kde) uses them to avoid loading the header multiple times

ifndef Tutorial1_HEADER
define Tutorial1_HEADER

include <Plasma/Applet>



class QSizeF;
//this is how classes in Plasma can be forward-declared
//since C++ won't allow something like:
// class Plasma::LineEdit;
//by itself..
namespace {

   class Plasma::LineEdit;
   class Plasma::PushButton;

}
// Define our plasma Applet
class PlasmaTutorial1 : public Plasma::Applet
{

   Q_OBJECT
   public:
       // Basic Create/Destroy
       PlasmaTutorial1(QObject *parent, const QVariantList &args);
       ~PlasmaTutorial1();

       void init();

   private:
       Plasma::LineEdit *m_lineEdit;
       Plasma::PushButton *m_pushButton;

};
// This is the command that links your applet to the .desktop file
// The previous example showed it in the source file. Either way is fine,
//I prefer this, as it's more obvious, and macro's tend to be used in headers usually anyways.
//other applets in Plasma seem to use it too.
K_EXPORT_PLASMA_APPLET(tutorial1, PlasmaTutorial1)

endif

The source file...

Remember, Plasma has camel-cased header includes as well, so if you prefer, you can just use e.g. #include <Plasma/Svg>, etc.

plasma-tutorial1.cpp

include "plasma-tutorial1.h"

include <QPainter>
include <QFontMetrics>
include <QSizeF>
include <QGraphicsLinearLayout>

include <plasma/theme.h>
include <plasma/widgets/lineedit.h>
include <plasma/widgets/pushbutton.h>



PlasmaTutorial1::PlasmaTutorial1(QObject *parent, const QVariantList &args)

   : Plasma::Applet(parent, args),
     m_lineEdit(0), m_pushButton(0)  //don't forget to initialze your pointers to zero or *else*!!

   // this will get us the standard applet background, for free!
   setBackgroundHints(DefaultBackground);
   resize(200, 200);

}


PlasmaTutorial1::~PlasmaTutorial1()
{

   if (hasFailedToLaunch()) {
       // Do some cleanup here
   } else {
       // Save settings
   }

}
//we do all of our GUI stuff in here. Only basic things should be placed
//in the regular constructor, like turning on the configuration interface, resize of main widget, simple stuff.
void PlasmaTutorial1::init()
{

 QGraphicsLinearLayout *layout = new QGraphicsLinearLayout(this);
 layout->setOrientation(Qt::Vertical); //so widgets will be stacked up/down

 m_lineEdit = new Plasma::LineEdit(this);
 m_lineEdit->setText("Hey! This is a Plasma line edit.");

 m_pushButton = new Plasma::PushButton(this);
 m_pushButton->setText("Whoa! This is a Plasma pushbutton.");

 layout->addItem(m_lineEdit);
 layout->addItem(m_pushButton);

include "plasma-tutorial1.moc"