Navigation between forms

8105

Good evening everyone.

I'd like some advice about the design of my little Qt app. But first here's what in my app at the moment:

1- my MainWindow is pretty much your typical menu, multiple buttons dedicated each for a certain functionality (login, help, about, etc...)
2- every functionality has a designer form class.
3- currently, main creates an instance of MainWindow and shows it

Now, what I know how to do is creating instances of the design forms and showing them in a "MainWindow()::on_functionality_button_clicked()" slot, and hiding the MainWindow.

The problem with that is that if I chose to login for example, the login form is showed and if I successfully identify myself, I can use the same mechanism to, say, open an interface or something.
But what if I want to cancel the login, and want to view the user guide before? If the login form is instantiated inside a slot in MainWindow, how can I reshow the MainWindow if I close a form functionality like the login?
How can I navigate between forms in a responsive way?

I hope you're understanding my problem. Your help is really appreciated.

dheerendra

Your loginObject & MainWindow object should be independent. Each of these objects should have appropriate signals and slots. You need to connect between them using signal & slots.

Login object has to have success & fail signals.

Login *log = new Login
MainWindow *mW = new MainWindow

connect(log,SIGNAL(success()),mW,SLOT(show());

if something fails.
connect(log,SIGNAL(Fail()),mW,SLOT(hide());

So tight coupling between Login object & MainWindow should be avoided.

mostefa

Hi @8105

If you have a lot of widgets and you want to navigate between these widgets for me the best solution to do , is to have a QStackedWidget and add all your pages to this stackedWidget

The QStackedWidget class provides a stack of widgets where only one widget is visible at a time.

Have a look at QStackedWidget doc:

http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qstackedwidget.html#details

As second thing i advise you to use is the QStateMachine framework, this will allow you to know at any moment (the state of your app , and the form) and to go to the current next state (form)

Have a look at QStatemachine framework:

http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/statemachine-api.html

In Qt examples there is still an example with using QStackedWidget

http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwidgets-dialogs-configdialog-example.html

Hope this can help !

8105

Thank you both for the advice.