Boost Signals And Slots Vs Qt

When implementing your own signals/slots, there is no need to do the listener management yourself as this is done by the qt object system Signal A signal is a way to. Jan 06, 2011 The Original IBM PC 5150 - the story of the world's most influential computer - Duration: 27:28. Modern Classic Recommended for you.

12 Sep 2004

The article describes an efficient way to implement delegates in C++ using Signal and Slot pattern.

Qt Connect Signal Slot

Introduction

In my previous article “Generic Observer Pattern and Events in C++”, we discussed classical “Observer Pattern” and its implementation in C++ using templates. An event class CppEvent introduced in that article allowed us to bind together loosely coupled classes, by connecting one class containing CppEvent to other class member functions. Member functions could be of any number and types of arguments, and no relations or special inheritance for model and view classes are required.

The only problem here is that we can’t delete our view without detaching it from the model first without risk of crashing our application on the next call of the event notification. It’s becoming annoying when we have many models created and deleted dynamically. To resolve this problem, we need a delegate which removes itself from the model when the view is deleted. To accomplish this task, we use Signal and Slot concept. This concept had been introduced in Trolltech Qt library and Boost C++ library.

Using Signal and Slots

To demonstrate how signals and slots work, we create a model class containing CppSignal member and a view class containing CppSlot.

Note that we use CppSignal1 to specify signal with one parameter; for two and three parameters there are CppSignal2 and CppSignal3. We could avoid this name multiplicity for standard C++ compiler, it’s done for portability with VC++ 6, which is still in use.

Note that slot member is initialized in the constructor of the view class. It’s initialized with pointer to the view class and member function. Now, to connect model to the view, we need to connect its signals with slots.

Now we can create another view and connect it to the same model.

In order to track return values from view's callback functions, we can use collector function object. For example, an object counting return values will be:

And when it is passed as a second parameter of emit_sig method, it will return sum of view responses.

Qt Debug Signal And Slot

Now we can delete one of the views and the sum of responses will change accordingly.

Signals and Slots implementation

Qt Vs Boost

Implementation of CppSignal and CppSlot is very similar to CppEvent in “Generic Observer Pattern and Events in C++”.