Subclassing QGraphicsScene

  • Hey all,

    So I am trying to write a subclass of QGraphicsScene, so that I can get key and mouse press events, and send them out with custom signals to the main UI. However, I can't for the life of me find a straightforward answer on how to do it, so here I am. This is what I have so far:

    #include <QtGui>
    #include <QGraphicsScene>
    class QKeyEvent;
    class QGraphicsSceneMouseEvent;

    class MapScene : public QGraphicsItem {

    MapScene(QObject *parent = 0);

    void deselectPoints();
    void selectPoints(QRectF);
    void sendPoint(QPoint);

    void keyPressEvent(QKeyEvent *event);
    void mousePressEvent(QGraphicsSceneMouseEvent *event);
    void mouseReleaseEvent(QGraphicsSceneMouseEvent *event);

    I know this is incorrect, but no matter how I write the constructor declarations or class headers I get various compile errors- either undefined references for the constructor/deconstructor, or no know conversion to QObject, or others. Any help? I feel this is a pretty basic question which is why I'm surprised it's proving difficult.

  • Do you have actual code for constructor ad destructor?
    Did you take a look at examples (Diagram Scene Example has this covered pretty good)?
    Q_OBJECT is not needed ( not sure if it's even possible).

  • So you have
    @class MapScene : public QGraphicsItem @

  • It turns out the Q_OBJECT was needed (although I agree it shouldn't be). I kept getting errors saying it needed to be there if I eliminated it. But it turns out the constructor/destructor both in this and in the .cpp file were incorrect, so it basically thought they weren't there. I also needed it to extend QGraphicsScene, not QGraphicsItem. Works now though... thank you for the tip!

  • The Q_OBJECT macro is only for QObject-based classes. QGraphicsItem is not a QObject based class.

    Since it isn't, it also can't have signals. Without the Q_OBJECT macro, the C++ compiler will not understand what to do about those signals, and throw errors. With the Q_OBJECT macro, the compiler is pacified, but since you are not actually having a QObject-based class, they won't work.

    If you need signals in your class, change the base class to QGraphicsObject.

  • I actually ended up making the base class QGraphicsScene, because really that's what I was subclassing anyway, which resolved the conflict.

    I had still been wondering what the macro was doing, thank you for the explanation.

  • The Q_OBJECT macro does more than I wrote. Basically, it sets everything up so Qt's meta object system can be used.

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