Introduction
Signals and Slots. In Qt, we have an alternative to the callback technique: We use signals and slots. A signal is emitted when a particular event occurs. Qt's widgets have many predefined signals, but we can always subclass widgets to add our own signals to them. A slot is a function that is called in response to a particular signal. How often is a an object copied, if it is emitted by a signal as a const reference and received by a slot as a const reference? How does the behaviour differ for direct and queued signal-slot connections? What changes if we emit the object by value or receive it by value? Nearly every customer asks this question at some point in a project.
Remember old X-Window call-back system? Generally it isn't type safe and flexible. There are many problems with them. Qt offer new event-handling system - signal-slot connections. Imagine alarm clock. When alarm is ringing, signal is sending (emitting). And you're handling it as a slot.
- Every QObject class may have as many signals of slots as you want.
- You can emit signal only from that class, where signal is.
- You can connect signal with another signal (make chains of signals);
- Every signal and slot can have unlimited count of connections with other.
- ATTENTION! You can't set default value in slot attributes. e.g.
Connection
You can connect signal with this template:
You have to wrap const char * signal and const char * method into SIGNAL () and SLOT() macros.
And you also can disconnect signal-slot:
Deeper
Widgets emit signals when events occur. For example, a button will emit a 'clicked' signal when it is clicked. A developer can choose to connect to a signal by creating a function (a 'slot') and calling the function to relate the signal to the slot. Qt's signals and slots mechanism does not require classes to have knowledge of each other, which makes it much easier to develop highly reusable classes. Since signals and slots are type-safe, type errors are reported as warnings and do not cause crashes to occur.For example, if a Quit button's signal is connected to the application's slot, a user's click on Quit makes the application terminate. In code, this is written as
Qt Signal Slot With 2 Arguments
Connections can be added or removed at any time during the execution of a Qt application, they can be set up so that they are executed when a signal is emitted or queued for later execution, and they can be made between objects in different threads.
Qt Signal Slot Example
The signals and slots mechanism is implemented in standard C++. The implementation uses the C++ preprocessor and moc, the Meta-Object Compiler, included with Qt. Code generation is performed automatically by Qt's build system. Developers never have to edit or even look at the generated code.
Qt Signal Slot Connect
