Programming with Qt, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. A Guided Tour Through the Simple Widgets

Qt is a rich library and as a beginner, you could easily find yourself reinventing the wheel when a Qt class that meets your needs already exists. This is why we present widgets that are already available with their most useful methods in this chapter and in Chapter 5. We also provide guidelines that specify when to use a certain widget.

This widget tour has two parts. This chapter presents so-called simple widgets, such as push buttons and labels. The next chapter contains the predefined dialog boxes that Qt provides for common tasks such as opening files, as well as the building blocks for defining your own dialogs. Some widgets with a more specific task, such as those used for displaying database data, are described in other chapters to stay with their underlying classes.

For most of the widgets, we show screenshots depicting them in both Windows and Motif styles because these styles are used most frequently. In other styles like the SGI style, the widgets may look somewhat different. To ensure that you can find them easily in the reference, most screenshots are taken directly from the Qt reference documentation, with the kind permission of Trolltech AS.

For your convenience, Table 4-1 contains all widgets that ship with Version 3 of Qt. They are listed alphabetically, each with a short description and a reference to the section of this book where they are explained further.

Table 4-1. The widget classes in Qt 3

Widget	Description ...