title: Python: How to use ListWidget Items to store and retrieve objects: Easy
body: <p>After working with QListWidget and other 'listing' widgets I've finally arrived to what seems to be an easy solution to store and retrieve the List's Item classes (QListWidgetItem). The problem I was introducing to my self was behind the fact that I thought the QListWidgetItem could only be used to store its label name (the one used to display in ListWidget). By the time QListWidget was populated with QListWidgetItems I had to declare a dictionary where each key would be a label name of the item and a value would be equal to the object itself (dangerous approach since two or more items could have the same name while dictionaries can only have a single key with the same name). Then when an item would be clicked I would capture that List Item label (name) and look through the dictionary's keys to find a corresponding object. All these could be easily avoided if I declare my own custom myItem() class which  inherits from QListWidgetItem. Now when a List Item clicked I can get object from it directly just like I call .getTime() method. Please let me know if I am missing or misunderstanding anything before committing to using this approach in my code.</p>
  
  <pre><code>from PyQt4 import QtGui, QtCore
  import sys, os
  
  
  class myItem(QtGui.QListWidgetItem):
      def __init__(self, name):
          super(myItem, self).__init__()
          self.name=name
      def getTime(self):
          import datetime
          return datetime.datetime.now()   
  
  class Dialog_01(QtGui.QMainWindow):
      def __init__(self):
          super(QtGui.QMainWindow,self).__init__()
  
          myQWidget = QtGui.QWidget()
          myBoxLayout = QtGui.QVBoxLayout()
          myQWidget.setLayout(myBoxLayout)
          self.setCentralWidget(myQWidget)
  
          self.listWidget = QtGui.QListWidget()
  
          self.listWidget.currentItemChanged.connect(self.item_clicked)
  
          for i in range(12):
              name='Item '+str(i)
              my_item=myItem(name)
              my_item.setText('Item '+str(i))
              self.listWidget.addItem(my_item)
  
          myBoxLayout.addWidget(self.listWidget)
  
      def item_clicked(self, arg=None):
          print arg.text(), arg.getTime()
  
  
  if __name__ == '__main__':
      app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
      dialog_1 = Dialog_01()
      dialog_1.show()
      dialog_1.resize(480,320)
      sys.exit(app.exec_())
  </code></pre>