Drawing custom Widgets

Pemdas

I am looking for some advice on how to implement a list view with custom content in each row. I have implemented exactly what I want using QLIstWidget, but the QListwidget "eats" any widgets that I pass to it and I don't want that behavior. Also, this list could be "long" and I don't want to allocate 100s of widgets.

The easiest why to describe what I am trying to accomplish is to look at my delegate paint function. This is just a simple example for the sake of this question.

void CustomItemDelegate::paint(QPainter *painter, const QStyleOptionViewItem &option,
const QModelIndex &index) const
{

qDebug() << "Painting something" << endl;
if(index.data().canConvert<CustomModelItem>())
{
    CustomModellItem item = qvariant_cast<CustmomModelItem>(index.data());
    QApplication::style()->drawControl(QStyle::CE_ItemViewItem, &option, painter, item.getItem());
}
else
{
    qDebug() << "Delegate...something broken 2" << endl;
    QStyledItemDelegate::paint(painter, option, index);

}

}
CustomModelItem is nothing more than a wrapper structure that holds a pointer a custom widget.

I realize that I could just manual draw the control since it is nothing more than a collection of labels and icons, but I want to draw the item with properties that are defined in a stylesheet. Any advice would be appreciated.