[SOLVED] Cross-process UI interactions (Qt 4.8, Windows)

[PEspie]

Hi All,

I'm quite new on Qt platform, sorry if I ask for some trivial questions (you can kick me to HOWTO if I've missed some ;)

I need to create a system to permit the creation of plug-in in our application, which is obviously written with Qt.
The requirement are simple:

• Plug-in should live in another process (for security/stability reasons)
• Plug-in should have access to at least a QWidget (I guess that behind, it will be a class derived from QWidget) to plys with (add it own widgets, draw inside, etc.)

On other words, I would need a kind of screen server (in my app) and a screen client (in my plug-in). The last one should be perfectly transparent for the plug-in.

There is an old demonstration wrote by "Marius" (I guess a kind of Qt God?) which do exactly what I need here: "A Lighthouse with Windows":http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2010/02/10/a-lighthouse-with-windows/ but the code is quite old (2010/02) and does not compile at all on Qt 4.8 version.

It seems that all this is working on Linux, but I can't choose the platform: it's Windows.

Any suggestion are welcome!

Thanks a lot
PEspie

[rcari]

Because you need to isolate the plugin in another process you'll have to deal with Inter Process Communication (IPC).
On Windows there are two ways of doing this with Qt: shared memory and sockets. Shared memory can work but it's usually overkill to implement or maintain... You should maybe look at TCP/IP and design some sort of client/server protocol for the plugin to interact with your main application.

Otherwise, I think you can use Windows native SendMessage/PostMessage to do some remote calls across processes given a window handle.

[rcari]

Another option could be to create the child process using QProcess and use stdin/stdout streams to communicate with it. Some more protocol needed :)

[PEspie]

Thanks for your answer.

We finally choose to use some IPC for communication between processes, but the real challenge was the display ... how to display from a process into another process window ?

This was solved by using, on Windows platform, the API function ::SetParent which permit to attach a window as a child of another window. This works across process boundary, so our problem is solved.

Once again, thanks!

[francois]

Pespie,

I have to execute a QWidget (in fact a QAxWidget) into an other process to protect my application from ActiveX crashes.

If I understand well, you used the SetParent() function to attach two widgets running in two different processes and then created an IPC protocol to handle signals, slots, method calls, etc... Am I right ?

Thanks