[Developers] Splitting your dialog

[Nanne Hemstra]

Hi all,

When you develop a dialog with a lot of fields it's always a good idea 
to use the uiGroup class. All objects (or ui-fields) which kind of 
belong to each other should be put into one group. It has multiple 
advantages, first of all the layout becomes better, but also your code 
is much cleaner and easier to understand.
When resizing the dialog you often want to be able to resize these 
groups separately. In these situations the uiSplitter class can be used. 
It gives you a nice handle between the groups to control their size. The 
uiSplitter is build on top of Qt's QSplitter, but we implemented only a 
few functions. Please look in $WORK/include/uiBase/ for the uisplitter.h 
header file.

The constructor has three arguments, its parent (most often 'this' 
pointer), a name, and the orientation or layout of the groups ('true' 
for horizontally, 'false' for vertically). Then with addGroup you add 
the groups which should be split from each other . When adding 2 groups 
you get one handle, when adding 3 groups two handles, etc.

Here's an example of how you could write your code in a dialog's 
constructor:

uiGroup* leftgrp = new uiGroup( this, "Left group" );
// add fields to leftgrp

uiGroup* rightgrp = new uiGroup( this, "Right group" );
// add fields to rightgrp

uiSplitter* splitter = new uiSplitter( this, "My Splitter", true );
splitter->addGroup( leftgrp );
splitter->addGroup( rightgrp );


Good luck.

Regards,
Nanne



-- 
- Nanne Hemstra
- OpendTect developer
-
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