How do I build a QMenu bar and then assign it to a widget?

graniteDev

I have several applications that all use the same exact menu across the top. Right now I've made the menu in the standard way like so:

QMenu * utilMenu = menuBar()->addMenu("Utilities");
QMenu * envMenu = menuBar()->addMenu("Environment");
QMenu * devMenu = menuBar()->addMenu("Dev Tools");

QAction *networkAction = new QAction("Network",this);
QAction *deviceViewer = new QAction("Device Version Viewer", this);

networkAction->setCheckable(false);
deviceViewer->setCheckable(false);

utilMenu->addAction(networkAction);
utilMenu->addAction(deviceViewer);
utilMenu->addSeparator();

connect(networkAction,SIGNAL(triggered()),this,SLOT(onNetworkAction()));
connect(deviceViewer,SIGNAL(triggered()),this,SLOT(onDeviceViewer()));

//and so on and so forth for each QMenu until they are all populated

I do this for all the menu items, everything works just fine. The issue is, I have this exact code, in all my applications. This is not DRY at all, and any time a feature is added or removed from the menu I've got the change this thing in multiple locations.

I have various libraries of custom utilities and widgets that these applications all share, there has got to be a way to do something similar for setting up a common menubar.

What I really want is to have an external standard QMenuBar object kept in an external class, that is already set up, and I can just assign each apps menuBar object this standardized menu bar.

I've been looking over the documentation until my eyes glazed over. Is it even possible to do what I want here? Is there a better way that has escaped me to allow for a shared standard menubar across my applications?

I've even looked to see if there is a way to copy code verbatim from say a text file at compile time and just dump that text into a function on each app. I don't see a way to do that either.

SGaist

Hi,

Why not have a method to which you pass the menu to populate ? That method could be in your library.

graniteDev

@SGaist That's exactly what I want. That's exactly what I tried to do, but I can't find a way to pass that menu to the menuBar of the mainwindow. The documentation is silent on handing menuBar a prebuilt menu for it to use. It only details how to construct a menubar from within the widget itself.

interestingly, just using an include statement inside the blank function with all the above code worked. It might be an effective work around until I can figure out how to abstract this code into a class.

SGaist

Something like:

MyHelpers.cpp

void populateMenuBar(QMenuBar *menuBar)
{
QMenu * utilMenu = menuBar->addMenu("Utilities");
}

MainWindow.cpp

#include "MyHelpers.h"

MainWindow(QWidget *parent):
    QMainWindow(parent)
{
    populateMenuBar(menuBar());    
}

?

graniteDev

@SGaist Now I feel like an idiot. I was looking in completely the wrong place in the documentation. I didn't even think to look for a function within QMainWindow. I was focusing on QMenu and QMenuBar etc.

Thank you for pointing out the obvious.