Confusions between GoToSlot GUI vs Connect Manually

scotryder

Hi there,

I'm new to QT and hope to learn a lot from you guys.

My confusion is, we can connect a button's signal with a slot using Connect function in script, which we can see as we wrote it and change the function name and it still works.

but when we simply select Go To Slot from GUI, select the signal and QT generates an event handler for that which works. but i dont see its "connect" code happening anywhere. which means if i change the generated event handler name it no longers work.

please advise
which feature i should prefer?

Thanks

Chris Kawa

The code for the connection is created as part of the ui generation i.e. it is done when you call ui->setupUi(this) in your widget.
If you look into the generated header file (the ui_YourClassName.h file) there's a call to QMetaObject::connectSlotsByName(). This is the method that does it.

Personally I don't like it and don't use it at all. My 3 reasons for that are:

It's "magic" i.e. if you don't know about it there's no easy way to discover it. It's easy to forget about it and accidentally break by renaming something.
If you change the object name you need to change the slot name and vice versa. This creates dependency between two objects. It's artificial and unnecessary. The idea behind signal/slots is exactly the opposite - it allows to connect objects without such hard dependencies.
It enforces the usage of the snake_case syntax for the slot and the on_* naming convention that I don't use and would look weird in my code base. I'm naming my slots for what they do, not what they react to i.e. doSomething() instead of onSomethingHappened(), because that self-comments the method about what it is doing.

mrjj

Hi
The most solid approach is using the new connect syntax
https://wiki.qt.io/New_Signal_Slot_Syntax

connect(
    sender, &Sender::valueChanged,
    receiver, &Receiver::updateValue
);

As it will fail compile time if anything wrong and not at runtime as with both
QMetaObject::connectSlotsByName() and SLOT()/SIGNAL() syntax

I like the connectSlotsByName() for prototyping but as Chris pointed out its
a bit too magical and breaks so easy so using it in production code is asking for troubles.

scotryder

Thank you very much guys for the support, no doubt QT has one of the best communities.
@mrjj you are a champion, thank you for this tip.