A custom widget to display and select among multiple graphic views

Question

I have a collection of images, dynamically generated through QGraphicsView widgets, and i'd like my users to choose between them. For that purpose, i would display inside a custom widget available images in some kind of grid and have users click the one they are interested in.

Multiple questions arise :

• is there an existing widget that already fits this purpose ?
• should i find a way to disable all mouse event handling by QGraphicsView items, or could i add a transparent widget in front of graphic views which would intercept them ?
• is there a performance issue displaying many QGraphicsView widgets (up to a few hundreds) ? Should i export them to plain images first ?

Answer 1

First off, no, there's no widget designed specifically for that purpose.

I don't think you are grasping what QGraphicsView is for. It's for displaying a QGraphicsScene, which is meant to hold many QGraphicsItems. Based on your post, I can't see why you would need multiple QGraphicsViews. You can simply have one QGraphicsView and display many images inside of its scene. For example, see QGraphicsPixmapItem.

You definitely should not have hundreds of QGraphicsViews. You probably just want one (although a few could be justified in certain circumstances), in which you display many QGraphicsItems in a QGraphicsScene. You can definitely have hundreds of QGraphicsItems visible at once. In your case, you probably want QGraphicsPixmapItems, which are a subclass of QGraphicsItem. You could even have multiple QGraphicsScenes, and display whichever one is relevant using QGraphicsView::setScene. If you want the user to be able to select an image from a grid, and then work with that image, I would look to the State Pattern.

I can't think of any reason to disable mouse handling in QGraphicsViews, QGraphicsScenes, or QGraphicsItems. Why should these not handle their own mouse events? You can (and should, where necessary) subclass them and reimplement mousePressEvent, mouseMoveEvent, mouseRelease event, etc. to obtain the functionality you want.

Good luck!