Nexsys: Connecting the NavigationWidget to the Main Window

In the last window, we started connecting our UI components from our NavigationWidget class to itself to start with some of our basic file system navigation.

Now, we're going to connect the system up to the Main Window, to the actions that we had created on the window itself.

This is a little trickier - because while the navigation widget knows its own relationships, we're going to need to determine out of a multitude of possible navigation widgets, which one to apply the action to from the main window - its not as simple as just connecting the signal to a slot on the widget.

Nexsys: NavigationWidget Slots

We've started blocking in our interface pretty well - we're at least getting some of what we'd expect for a file browsing application - namely, we can see files.

But now we really have to get in there and start working with connecting up all the blocked in actions to some slots to do the real work.

Nexsys: NavigationWidget

While the Main Window is going to be the container for our filesystem browsing, the real heavy lifting is going to come from a separate custom widget - the NavigationWidget.

This tutorial will start us going through the creation of this smaller component that we'll then use inside of our main window.

By the end of this tutorial, your application should actually start navigating the folder system and look like this:

Nexsys: Running the Application

The last few tutorials have been almost entirely based in the Qt Designer, and with our Main Window now mostly complete, it's time to jump back into the code.

While each of those tutorials was long and may have taken a long time to go through (or maybe not, I don't know), the more you get into this workflow and become comfortable with the Qt toolset - the faster you'll be able to get those ui mockups done.

The next step though is to start putting that UI to use.

Nexsys: Main Window Ui (Part IV)

In this section we're going to finish up our main window by adding some icons to our actions, and then look into how to reuse them for a toolbar.

Nexsys: Main Window Ui (Part III)

At this point we have a pretty well blocked out interface for our main window.  There are still a couple more steps that we're going to do in designer before we jump back into the, to make sure we get the most out of our interface builder.

Nexsys: Main Window Ui (Part II)

Now that we have our menu's and actions flushed out, we can start adding in the main components to our central widget.

Nexsys: Main Window Ui

If you've made it this far, then you will know that our main window is really dull.  It pops up at random, doesn't load anything and generally is rather unimpressive.

This is where we start actually putting some information into our appliction and make it look like an actual application.

Nexsys: Main Window

 So we have the root package setup for the nexsys application.  Right now, it is not doing anything more than our Hello, World example however.  So the next step we're going to do is to create the main window for our application.

Nexsys: Starting a Full Application

So far, the tutorials we've been doing have all been single scripts, and isolated from each other.

Now that we have a basic understanding of what Qt is, we're going to go more in depth on the real power of what Qt can do.  We'll do this by starting to build a full application.

This is going to be the first of many tutorials designed to take you step-by-step through my thought process as I develop a new application using Qt.