Qt for Python Tutorial SimpleDialog

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Creating a simple PySide dialog application

In this tutorial we will show how to build a simple dialog with some basic widgets. The idea is that the user inserts his name in a QLineEdit, clicks a QPushButton and sees greetings.

Let us just start with a simple stub which creates and shows a dialog. This stub will be updated in the course of this tutorial but you can use this stub to your own PySide projects if you need to.

#!/usr/bin/python
# -'''- coding: utf-8 -'''-

import sys
from PySide.QtCore import *
from PySide.QtGui import *

class Form(QDialog):

 def __init__(self, parent=None):
 super(Form, self).__init__(parent)
 self.setWindowTitle("My Form")


if __name__ == '__main__':
 # Create the Qt Application
 app = QApplication(sys.argv)
 # Create and show the form
 form = Form()
 form.show()
 # Run the main Qt loop
 sys.exit(app.exec_())

If you have followed the previous tutorials, you are already familiar with a lot of the code here. The imports aren't new to you, the same for the creation of the QApplication and the execution of the Qt main loop. The only novelty here is the class definition.

You can create any class which subclasses PySide widgets. In this case, we are just subclassing the QDialog to do our custom dialog which we've called "Form". We have also implemented the init() method which calls the QDialog init method with the parent widget, if any. Also new, is the setWindowTitle() which just sets the title of the dialog window. Also, in main(), you can see that we are creating a Form object, and showing it to the world.

Create the widgets

We are going to create two widgets- a QLineEdit where the user can insert his name, and a QPushButton which we will use to print the contents of the QLineEdit. So, we are going to add the following code to theinit()* method of our Form:

# Create widgets
self.edit = QLineEdit("Write my name here..")
self.button = QPushButton("Show Greetings")

As should be intuitive by now, both widgets will show the corresponding texts.

Create a layout to organize the widgets

Qt comes with some layouts which helps the user on the organization of his widgets on an application. In this case, we will make it simple and create a QVBoxLayout which will distribute the widgets vertically. The following code will be added also to the init() method, after the creation of the widgets:

# Create layout and add widgets
layout = QVBoxLayout()
layout.addWidget(self.edit)
layout.addWidget(self.button)
# Set dialog layout
self.setLayout(layout)

So, we create the layout, add the widgets with addWidget(), and finally we say that our Form will have our QVBoxLayout as its layout.

Create the function to greet and connect the button

Finally, we just have to add a function to our custom Form- the one which will greet the user - and connect our button to it. Our function will be a part of the Form, so you have to add it after the init() function:

# Greets the user
def greetings(self):
 print ("Hello s" self.edit.text())

Our function just writes the contents of the QLineEdit to the python console. We have access to the text by means of the QLineEdit.text() method.

Now that we have everything, we just need to connect the QPushButton to the Form.greetings() method. In the init() method we just need to add:

# Add button signal to greetings slot
self.button.clicked.connect(self.greetings)

Once executed, you can insert your name in the QLineEdit and watch the console for greetings.

Things you can do:

• Instead of showing your name in the python console, can you show your name in a popup message box? Check the detailed description of QMessageBox in the PySide online reference
• Can you add a Icon to the window? Check the description of QWidget in the PySide online reference
• What about adding a button to close? Just create a new button, add it to the layout and connect it to the exit slot.
• You can also change the layout to horizontal! You do it with QHBoxLayout. Check other layouts in the PySide online reference such as QHBoxLayout, QGridLayout among others.

Full Code

Here is the full code for this tutorial:

1. !/usr/bin/python
2. -- coding: utf-8 --

import sys from PySide.QtCore import * from PySide.QtGui import *

class Form(QDialog):

def init(self, parent=None):

super(Form, self).init(parent)
# Create widgets
self.edit = QLineEdit("Write my name here")
self.button = QPushButton("Show Greetings")
# Create layout and add widgets
layout = QVBoxLayout()
layout.addWidget(self.edit)
layout.addWidget(self.button)
# Set dialog layout
self.setLayout(layout)
# Add button signal to greetings slot
self.button.clicked.connect(self.greetings)

1. Greets the user

def greetings(self):
print ("Hello s" self.edit.text())

if name == main:

# Create the Qt Application
app = QApplication(sys.argv)
# Create and show the form
form = Form()
form.show()
# Run the main Qt loop
sys.exit(app.exec_())