I was going through the
"Getting started" section for Qt using VS2012 as my IDE, and I got stuck when I had to add a
slot to a button. Apparently there is a
bug when using the Visual Studio add-in, that the submenu
Go to slot doesn't show up in a context menu in Qt Designer (see bug). Needless to say, I spent more than two hours trying to figure out how to get around this problem. The following is what I found:
Let's say you have a class called Notepad that has a
quit button and you want to handle when the button is
clicked. First create a private slot in the class definition in the header file - Notepad.h in this example.
class Notepad : public QMainWindow
{
...
private slots:
public void on_quitButton_clicked();
...
}
On the Notepad.cpp add the following:
void Notepad::on_quitButton_clicked();
{
}
Note: from what I read it's good idea to follow the convention on_name_signal() for all your custom slots.
Now open your *.ui file with Qt Designer. At this point I tried using the Signal/Slot editor to add the slot to the button on the GUI. The "custom" slot we wrote above however doesn't show up when you click the slot dropdown.
After scouring stackoverflow and the Qt forums I found a couple of ways to get the custom slot to show in the dropdown.
- Go to Signal/Slots mode by pressing F4 on your keyboard.
- Click on the button so that it changes color.
- Left-click and drag it to the top of the main window.
4. This brings up the Configure Connection window
5. On the left pane select the
Signal clicked()
6. On the right pane select
Edit
7. This brings yet another window, select the + button.
8. Enter the name of the custom slot, on_quitButton_clicked() in this case.
9. Click Ok and now you should be able to see the slot in the dropdown in Signal/Slot editor.
Pretty tedious, but if you want to use Visual Studio as the IDE, this is what you will have to go through until someone fixes the bug, or you decide to use Qt Creator. If I keep finding issues like this by using Visual Studio I think I'll have to do to the latter.
