"Simple" Stage 5

updateStatus

In Stage 4 the listing was long enough to fill one wiki page, so we did not spend much time discussing it. Now we can discuss several items in the list.

The updateStatus method from Simple "Finished" is shown in the inset below:

   1     def updateStatus(self, message):
   2         '''Keep status current.'''
   3         if self.fileName is not None:
   4             flbase = os.path.basename(self.fileName)
   5             self.setWindowTitle(unicode("Simple Editor - " + flbase + "[*]") )
   6             self.statusBar().showMessage(message, 5000)
   7             self.setWindowModified(self.dirty)

It is called whenever it seems desirable to update the status, including the displayed name of the file being edited. There is a strange addition of a string "[*]", which is shown only if the text in the editor has changed, except that it must not happen whilst the file name is still "None". When the program is instantiated, the init procedure sets sensibly the fileName to None.

Actually we never see the string "[*]" - PyQt is smart enough to show "fileName*" when the text is altered. If you examine the code, you will see that there is a signal

        self.textEdit.textChanged.connect(self.setDirty)

that is activated when the text has changed and it calls the method to set flag "dirty" to True, which in turn causes the updateStatus to be called. All the programming steps to achieve these fairly smart status indication changes can be figured out, but where do we get the basic information - what and how: title display changes, text in editor window changes etc.?

Qt Assistant

Just like the Qt Designer is an indispensable tool, so is Qt Assistant. Let me quote what a few better informed people on the PyQt mailing list

pyqt@riverbankcomputing.com

have told me about the need to use the Qt Assistant when I asked:

Is it possible to access lines of text in a textEdit?  If so how can I find information about it?

The answers from two gurus were:

If you enter findBlockByLineNumber in Qt Assistant you will see that this method  belongs to a QTextDocument object and returns a QTextBlock object QTextEdit has a method called "document()" which returns a QTextDocument.  Henning Schröder

and

Searching for some functionality of QTextEdit, e.g. how to get at a specific line via line number: 
 * Look up QTextEdit in assistant
   We read: The QTextEdit class provides a widget that is used to edit and
   display both plain and rich text. 
 * Click on more...
   We read: QTextEdit works on paragraphs and characters. A paragraph is a
   formatted string which is word-wrapped to fit into the width of the
   widget. By default when reading plain text, one newline signifies a paragraph.
   Sounds like we're looking for paragraphs in plain text mode
 * Check class methods, that do what we want: 
   Nothing obvious stands out
 * Check base classes:
   QTextEdit inherits from QAbstractScrollArea only, that won't help us
   much here
 * Check methods again: 
   Nothing obvious with paragraphs, but QTextDocument * document() might be
   interesting
 * Click on document() method:
   We read: Returns a pointer to the underlying document.
 * Check it out: click on QTextDocument
   We read: The QTextDocument class holds formatted text that can be viewed and edited 
   using a QTextEdit We're getting nearer, but still no ball: check out class methods
 * It has a method: QTextBlock findBlockByLineNumber ( int lineNumber ) 
   Sounds like the best fit: click on method
 * We read: Returns the text block that contains the specified lineNumber.
   What the hell is a QTextBlock? Click:
   It encapsulates text fragments, and provides access to them
 * Check methods: QString text() sounds, like what we are looking for
   We read: Returns the block's contents as plain text.
Target reached. Pete (Hans-Peter Jansen)

What I sought and got was not "a fish for one meal", but a line, hook and instructions to "feed me continually". It's now up to me to make good use of it. I feel morally obliged to share it with you!

Selecting and Compiling Resources

Concentrating our mind to code development, leads to unintended consequence of ignoring some other important aspects of programming, which, once learned, easily drift from our attention. Resources is one such aspect. Where do all the icon images come from?

First are the artistic images. There are several collections freely available in public domain. We used a "tango" collection. It is fairly extensive and freely available on the web. To save space in our tar balls, we selected images to a small collection that we call select_tango. To associate images to the icons, we edit a XML file simple.qrc:

<!DOCTYPE RCC><RCC version="1.0">
<qresource>
<file alias="filenew.png">select_tango/32x32/actions/document-new.png</file>
<file alias="fileopen.png">select_tango/32x32/actions/document-open.png</file>
<file alias="filesave.png">select_tango/32x32/actions/document-save.png</file>
<file alias="filesaveas.png">select_tango/32x32/actions/document-save-as.png</file>
<file alias="fileprint.png">select_tango/32x32/actions/document-print.png</file>
<file alias="filequit.png">select_tango/32x32/actions/system-log-out.png</file>
<file alias="about.png">select_tango/32x32/apps/preferences-system-session.png</file>
<file alias="help.png">select_tango/32x32/apps/help-browser.png</file>
<file>help/analysis.html</file>
<file>help/filemenu.html</file>
<file>help/index.html</file>
</qresource>
</RCC>

Let us look at the third line in more detail:

<file alias="filenew.png">select_tango/32x32/actions/document-new.png</file>

filenw.png is the program name for the image of the icon for the corresponding action; select_tango is the directory of our icon images selected from the tango collection. This line is almost self-explanatory for a human eye, but not for the computer. It can be converted to the computer readable format in several ways - one way is shown below:

pyrcc4 simple.qrc > qrc_simple.py

This command needs to be executed in the directory with subdirectories select_tango, help and, of course, file simple.qrc. For the record, I am using Python 2.6.6, Qt 4.7.0, PyQt 4.7.4 binaries from ubuntu 10.10 repositories. As the development proceeds in an astounding pace, all these may change and occasional incompatibility with earlier versions can not be completely ruled out.

What this last command achieves has a humorous shading: a human readable simple.qrc is converted to a computer readable qrc_simple.py. Obviously, what is computer readable, is not human readable and vice versa...

You will no doubt recall that qrc_simple and ui_simple are imported to the program and thus made available to augment the "Simple" text editor.

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PyQt/simple5 (last edited 2014-06-08 13:49:48 by DavidBoddie)

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