Object and Signal/Slot Explorer for Qt

I was searching on the net for a Qt Object Explorer that would help me to understand large software and that would help others to understand software that I write. But I could not find one, also it turns out that quite a few people are searching for one. A brief search in Qt’s mailing list would prove that some people want an object explorer.

While exploring parent/child relationships and object trees was easy, figuring out signal slot connections were tricky. After some basic code hunting and some hacks here and there, I was able to write an object explorer.

I then packaged it as a component and dropped it into VTK Designer, and the result was quite impressive.

The usage sematics is like this
a) Go to the Object Explorer tab
b) Clock on the “Interactive” check box.
c) Click on any widget whose connections and parent/child relationships you want to explore.
d) Click on any connection in the connections tab and the object explorer shows the connection for you 🙂

I will blog about the actual implementation sometime this weekend. I am sure it would help quite a few developers out there, it sure did help me.


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