Qt Signal Slot Const Reference

It makes sense to add it in the declaration of both signals and slots. Qt will take care automatically of the lifecycle for arguments passed across threads. SGNAL and SLOT all support both the versions with and without const & but it's faster at execution if you leave it out. So following your example. Void QCompleter:: activated ( const QModelIndex & index) signal This signal is sent when an item in the popup is activated by the user. (by clicking or pressing return). The item's index in the completionModel is given. Void QCompleter:: complete ( const QRect & rect = QRect ) slot.

1. Qt uses normalized signatures to decide whether two given signals and slots are compatible. Normalization reduces whitespace to a minimum, moves 'const' to the front where appropriate, removes 'const' from value types and replaces const references with values.
2. The socket notifier is enabled by default, i.e. It emits the activated signal whenever a socket event corresponding to its type occurs. Connect the activated signal to the slot you want to be called when an event corresponding to your socket notifier's type occurs. There are three types of socket notifiers: read, write, and exception.
3. In Qt, when emitting a signal that is connected to a slot or slots, it equates to a synchronous function call. Unless you've configured your signals and slots to use queued connections, then it is an asynchronous call and you should be careful when passing stack data and should pass a copy as if passing data to another thread.

Classes- Annotated- Tree- Functions- Home- StructureQte

Signals and slots are used for communication between objects. Thesignal/slot mechanism is a central feature of Qt and probably thepart that differs most from other toolkits.

In most GUI toolkits widgets have a callback for each action they cantrigger. This callback is a pointer to a function. In Qt, signals andslots have taken over from these messy function pointers.

Signals and slots can take any number of arguments of any type. They arecompletely typesafe: no more callback core dumps!

All classes that inherit from QObject or one of its subclasses(e.g. QWidget) can contain signals and slots. Signals are emitted byobjects when they change their state in a way that may be interestingto the outside world. This is all the object does to communicate. Itdoes not know if anything is receiving the signal at the other end.This is true information encapsulation, and ensures that the objectcan be used as a software component.

Slots can be used for receiving signals, but they are normal memberfunctions. A slot does not know if it has any signal(s) connected toit. Again, the object does not know about the communication mechanism andcan be used as a true software component.

You can connect as many signals as you want to a single slot, and asignal can be connected to as many slots as you desire. It is evenpossible to connect a signal directly to another signal. (This willemit the second signal immediately whenever the first is emitted.)

Together, signals and slots make up a powerful component programmingmechanism.

A Small Example

A minimal C++ class declaration might read:

A small Qt class might read:

This class has the same internal state, and public methods to access thestate, but in addition it has support for component programming usingsignals and slots: This class can tell the outside world that its statehas changed by emitting a signal, valueChanged(), and it hasa slot which other objects may send signals to.

All classes that contain signals and/or slots must mention Q_OBJECT intheir declaration.

Slots are implemented by the application programmer (that's you).Here is a possible implementation of Foo::setValue():

The line emit valueChanged(v) emits the signalvalueChanged from the object. As you can see, you emit asignal by using emit signal(arguments).

Here is one way to connect two of these objects together:

Calling a.setValue(79) will make a emit asignal, which b will receive,i.e. b.setValue(79) is invoked. b will in turnemit the same signal, which nobody receives, since no slot has beenconnected to it, so it disappears into hyperspace.

Note that the setValue() function sets the value and emitsthe signal only if v != val. This prevents infinite loopingin the case of cyclic connections (e.g. if b.valueChanged()were connected to a.setValue()).

This example illustrates that objects can work together without knowingeach other, as long as there is someone around to set up a connectionbetween them initially.

The preprocessor changes or removes the signals,slots and emit keywords so the compiler won'tsee anything it can't digest.

Run the moc on class definitions that containssignals or slots. This produces a C++ source file which should be compiledand linked with the other object files for the application.

Signals

Signals are emitted by an object when its internal state has changedin some way that might be interesting to the object's client or owner.Only the class that defines a signal and its subclasses can emit thesignal.

A list box, for instance, emits both highlighted() andactivated() signals. Most object will probably only beinterested in activated() but some may want to know aboutwhich item in the list box is currently highlighted. If the signal isinteresting to two different objects you just connect the signal toslots in both objects.

When a signal is emitted, the slots connected to it are executedimmediately, just like a normal function call. The signal/slotmechanism is totally independent of any GUI event loop. Theemit will return when all slots have returned.

If several slots are connected to one signal, the slots will beexecuted one after the other, in an arbitrary order, when the signalis emitted.

Signals are automatically generated by the moc and must not be implementedin the .cpp file. They can never have return types (i.e. use void).

A word about arguments: Our experience shows that signals and slotsare more reusable if they do not use special types. If QScrollBar::valueChanged() were to use a special type such as thehypothetical QRangeControl::Range, it could only be connected to slotsdesigned specifically for QRangeControl. Something as simple as theprogram in Tutorial 5 would be impossible.

Slots

A slot is called when a signal connected to it is emitted. Slots arenormal C++ functions and can be called normally; their only specialfeature is that signals can be connected to them. A slot's argumentscannot have default values, and as for signals, it is generally a badidea to use custom types for slot arguments.

Since slots are normal member functions with just a little extraspice, they have access rights like everyone else. A slot's accessright determines who can connect to it:

A public slots: section contains slots that anyone canconnect signals to. This is very useful for component programming:You create objects that know nothing about each other, connect theirsignals and slots so information is passed correctly, and, like amodel railway, turn it on and leave it running.

A protected slots: section contains slots that this classand its subclasses may connect signals to. This is intended forslots that are part of the class' implementation rather than itsinterface towards the rest of the world.

A private slots: section contains slots that only theclass itself may connect signals to. This is intended for verytightly connected classes, where even subclasses aren't trusted to getthe connections right.

Of course, you can also define slots to be virtual. We have foundthis to be very useful.

Signals and slots are fairly efficient. Of course there's some loss ofspeed compared to 'real' callbacks due to the increased flexibility, butthe loss is fairly small, we measured it to approximately 10 microsecondson a i586-133 running Linux (less than 1 microsecond when no slot has beenconnected) , so the simplicity and flexibility the mechanism affords iswell worth it.

Meta Object Information

The meta object compiler (moc) parses the class declaration in a C++file and generates C++ code that initializes the meta object. The metaobject contains names of all signal and slot members, as well aspointers to these functions.

The meta object contains additional information such as the object's class name. You can also check if an objectinherits a specific class, for example:

A Real Example

Here is a simple commented example (code fragments from qlcdnumber.h ).

QLCDNumber inherits QObject, which has most of the signal/slotknowledge, via QFrame and QWidget, and #include's the relevantdeclarations.

Q_OBJECT is expanded by the preprocessor to declare several memberfunctions that are implemented by the moc; if you get compiler errorsalong the lines of 'virtual function QButton::className not defined'you have probably forgotten to run the moc or toinclude the moc output in the link command.

It's not obviously relevant to the moc, but if you inherit QWidget youalmost certainly want to have parent and namearguments to your constructors, and pass them to the parentconstructor.

Some destructors and member functions are omitted here, the mocignores member functions.

QLCDNumber emits a signal when it is asked to show an impossiblevalue.

'But I don't care about overflow,' or 'But I know the number won'toverflow.' Very well, then you don't connect the signal to any slot,and everything will be fine.

'But I want to call two different error functions when the numberoverflows.' Then you connect the signal to two different slots. Qtwill call both (in arbitrary order).

A slot is a receiving function, used to get information about statechanges in other widgets. QLCDNumber uses it, as you can see, to setthe displayed number. Since display() is part of theclass' interface with the rest of the program, the slot is public.

Several of the example program connect the newValue signal of aQScrollBar to the display slot, so the LCD number continuously showsthe value of the scroll bar.

Note that display() is overloaded; Qt will select the appropriate versionwhen you connect a signal to the slot.With callbacks, you'd have to findfive different names and keep track of the types yourself.

Some more irrelevant member functions have been omitted from thisexample.

Moc output

This is really internal to Qt, but for the curious, here is the meatof the resulting mlcdnum.cpp:

That last line is because QLCDNumber inherits QFrame. The next part,which sets up the table/signal structures, has been deleted forbrevity.

One function is generated for each signal, and at present it almost alwaysis a single call to the internal Qt function activate_signal(), whichfinds the appropriate slot or slots and passes on the call. It is notrecommended to call activate_signal() directly.

Copyright © 2005 Trolltech

Trademarks

This is the sequel of my previous article explaining the implementation details of the signals and slots.In the Part 1, we have seenthe general principle and how it works with the old syntax.In this blog post, we will see the implementation details behind thenew function pointerbased syntax in Qt5.

New Syntax in Qt5

The new syntax looks like this:

Why the new syntax?

I already explained the advantages of the new syntax in adedicated blog entry.To summarize, the new syntax allows compile-time checking of the signals and slots. It also allowsautomatic conversion of the arguments if they do not have the same types.As a bonus, it enables the support for lambda expressions.

New overloads

There was only a few changes required to make that possible.
The main idea is to have new overloads to QObject::connect which take the pointersto functions as arguments instead of char*

There are three new static overloads of QObject::connect: (not actual code)

The first one is the one that is much closer to the old syntax: you connect a signal from the senderto a slot in a receiver object.The two other overloads are connecting a signal to a static function or a functor object withouta receiver.

They are very similar and we will only analyze the first one in this article.

Pointer to Member Functions

Before continuing my explanation, I would like to open a parenthesis totalk a bit about pointers to member functions.

Here is a simple sample code that declares a pointer to member function and calls it.

Pointers to member and pointers to member functions are usually part of the subset of C++ that is not much used and thus lesser known.
The good news is that you still do not really need to know much about them to use Qt and its new syntax. All you need to remember is to put the & before the name of the signal in your connect call. But you will not need to cope with the ::*, .* or ->* cryptic operators.

These cryptic operators allow you to declare a pointer to a member or access it.The type of such pointers includes the return type, the class which owns the member, the types of each argumentand the const-ness of the function.

You cannot really convert pointer to member functions to anything and in particular not tovoid* because they have a different sizeof.
If the function varies slightly in signature, you cannot convert from one to the other.For example, even converting from void (MyClass::*)(int) const tovoid (MyClass::*)(int) is not allowed.(You could do it with reinterpret_cast; but that would be an undefined behaviour if you callthem, according to the standard)

Pointer to member functions are not just like normal function pointers.A normal function pointer is just a normal pointer the address where thecode of that function lies.But pointer to member function need to store more information:member functions can be virtual and there is also an offset to apply to thehidden this in case of multiple inheritance.
sizeof of a pointer to a member function can evenvary depending of the class.This is why we need to take special care when manipulating them.

Type Traits: QtPrivate::FunctionPointer

Let me introduce you to the QtPrivate::FunctionPointer type trait.
A trait is basically a helper class that gives meta data about a given type.Another example of trait in Qt isQTypeInfo.

What we will need to know in order to implement the new syntax is information about a function pointer.

The template<typename T> struct FunctionPointer will give us informationabout T via its member.

• ArgumentCount: An integer representing the number of arguments of the function.
• Object: Exists only for pointer to member function. It is a typedef to the class of which the function is a member.
• Arguments: Represents the list of argument. It is a typedef to a meta-programming list.
• call(T &function, QObject *receiver, void **args): A static function that will call the function, applying the given parameters.

Qt still supports C++98 compiler which means we unfortunately cannot require support for variadic templates.Therefore we had to specialize our trait function for each number of arguments.We have four kinds of specializationd: normal function pointer, pointer to member function,pointer to const member function and functors.For each kind, we need to specialize for each number of arguments. We support up to six arguments.We also made a specialization using variadic templateso we support arbitrary number of arguments if the compiler supports variadic templates.

The implementation of FunctionPointer lies inqobjectdefs_impl.h.

QObject::connect

The implementation relies on a lot of template code. I am not going to explain all of it.

Here is the code of the first new overload fromqobject.h:

You notice in the function signature that sender and receiverare not just QObject* as the documentation points out. They are pointers totypename FunctionPointer::Object instead.This uses SFINAEto make this overload only enabled for pointers to member functionsbecause the Object only exists in FunctionPointer ifthe type is a pointer to member function.

We then start with a bunch ofQ_STATIC_ASSERT.They should generate sensible compilation error messages when the user made a mistake.If the user did something wrong, it is important that he/she sees an error hereand not in the soup of template code in the _impl.h files.We want to hide the underlying implementation from the user who should not needto care about it.
That means that if you ever you see a confusing error in the implementation details,it should be considered as a bug that should be reported.

We then allocate a QSlotObject that is going to be passed to connectImpl().The QSlotObject is a wrapper around the slot that will help calling it. It alsoknows the type of the signal arguments so it can do the proper type conversion.
We use List_Left to only pass the same number as argument as the slot, which allows connectinga signal with many arguments to a slot with less arguments.

QObject::connectImpl is the private internal functionthat will perform the connection.It is similar to the original syntax, the difference is that instead of storing amethod index in the QObjectPrivate::Connection structure,we store a pointer to the QSlotObjectBase.

The reason why we pass &slot as a void** is only tobe able to compare it if the type is Qt::UniqueConnection.

We also pass the &signal as a void**.It is a pointer to the member function pointer. (Yes, a pointer to the pointer)

Signal Index

We need to make a relationship between the signal pointer and the signal index.
We use MOC for that. Yes, that means this new syntaxis still using the MOC and that there are no plans to get rid of it :-).

MOC will generate code in qt_static_metacallthat compares the parameter and returns the right index.connectImpl will call the qt_static_metacall function with thepointer to the function pointer.

Once we have the signal index, we can proceed like in the other syntax.

The QSlotObjectBase

Qt Signal Slot Const Reference Sheet

QSlotObjectBase is the object passed to connectImplthat represents the slot.

Before showing the real code, this is what QObject::QSlotObjectBasewas in Qt5 alpha:

It is basically an interface that is meant to be re-implemented bytemplate classes implementing the call and comparison of thefunction pointers.

It is re-implemented by one of the QSlotObject, QStaticSlotObject orQFunctorSlotObject template class.

Fake Virtual Table

The problem with that is that each instantiation of those object would need to create a virtual table which contains not only pointer to virtual functionsbut also lot of information we do not need such asRTTI.That would result in lot of superfluous data and relocation in the binaries.

In order to avoid that, QSlotObjectBase was changed not to be a C++ polymorphic class.Virtual functions are emulated by hand.

The m_impl is a (normal) function pointer which performsthe three operations that were previously virtual functions. The 're-implementations'set it to their own implementation in the constructor.

Please do not go in your code and replace all your virtual functions by such ahack because you read here it was good.This is only done in this case because almost every call to connectwould generate a new different type (since the QSlotObject has template parameterswich depend on signature of the signal and the slot).

Protected, Public, or Private Signals.

Signals were protected in Qt4 and before. It was a design choice as signals should be emittedby the object when its change its state. They should not be emitted fromoutside the object and calling a signal on another object is almost always a bad idea.

However, with the new syntax, you need to be able take the addressof the signal from the point you make the connection.The compiler would only let you do that if you have access to that signal.Writing &Counter::valueChanged would generate a compiler errorif the signal was not public.

In Qt 5 we had to change signals from protected to public.This is unfortunate since this mean anyone can emit the signals.We found no way around it. We tried a trick with the emit keyword. We tried returning a special value.But nothing worked.I believe that the advantages of the new syntax overcome the problem that signals are now public.

Sometimes it is even desirable to have the signal private. This is the case for example inQAbstractItemModel, where otherwise, developers tend to emit signalfrom the derived class which is not what the API wants.There used to be a pre-processor trick that made signals privatebut it broke the new connection syntax.
A new hack has been introduced.QPrivateSignal is a dummy (empty) struct declared private in the Q_OBJECTmacro. It can be used as the last parameter of the signal. Because it is private, only the objecthas the right to construct it for calling the signal.MOC will ignore the QPrivateSignal last argument while generating signature information.See qabstractitemmodel.h for an example.

More Template Code

The rest of the code is inqobjectdefs_impl.h andqobject_impl.h.It is mostly standard dull template code.

I will not go into much more details in this article,but I will just go over few items that are worth mentioning.

Meta-Programming List

As pointed out earlier, FunctionPointer::Arguments is a listof the arguments. The code needs to operate on that list:iterate over each element, take only a part of it or select a given item.

That is why there isQtPrivate::List that can represent a list of types. Some helpers to operate on it areQtPrivate::List_Select andQtPrivate::List_Left, which give the N-th element in the list and a sub-list containingthe N first elements.

The implementation of List is different for compilers that support variadic templates and compilers that do not.

With variadic templates, it is atemplate<typename... T> struct List;. The list of arguments is just encapsulatedin the template parameters.
For example: the type of a list containing the arguments (int, QString, QObject*) would simply be:

Without variadic template, it is a LISP-style list: template<typename Head, typename Tail > struct List;where Tail can be either another List or void for the end of the list.
The same example as before would be:

ApplyReturnValue Trick

Qt Signal Slot Const Reference Generator

In the function FunctionPointer::call, the args[0] is meant to receive the return value of the slot.If the signal returns a value, it is a pointer to an object of the return type ofthe signal, else, it is 0.If the slot returns a value, we need to copy it in arg[0]. If it returns void, we do nothing.

The problem is that it is not syntaxically correct to use thereturn value of a function that returns void.Should I have duplicated the already huge amount of code duplication: once for the voidreturn type and the other for the non-void?No, thanks to the comma operator.

Qt Signal Slot Const Reference Guide

In C++ you can do something like that:

You could have replaced the comma by a semicolon and everything would have been fine.

Where it becomes interesting is when you call it with something that is not void:

There, the comma will actually call an operator that you even can overload.It is what we do inqobjectdefs_impl.h

ApplyReturnValue is just a wrapper around a void*. Then it can be usedin each helper. This is for example the case of a functor without arguments:

This code is inlined, so it will not cost anything at run-time.

Conclusion

This is it for this blog post. There is still a lot to talk about(I have not even mentioned QueuedConnection or thread safety yet), but I hope you found thisinterresting and that you learned here something that might help you as a programmer.

Qt Signal Slot Const Reference Example

Update:The part 3 is available.