Custom IO Device

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Writing a Custom I/O Device

This is a port of the article in Qt Quarterly 12 about writing a custom QIODevice

• Note: a more complex example can be found here Simple_Crypt_IO_Device

Usage:

The following code snippet shows how we would use the custom I/O device to encrypt data and store the result in a file:

 QFile file("output.dat");
 CryptDevice cryptDevice(&file)
 QTextStream out(&cryptDevice);
 cryptDevice.open(QIODevice::WriteOnly);
 out << "Hello World";

And on the possible usage (in our example code in git [1])

Encryption

 QByteArray dataArray;

QBuffer bufferUsedLikeAFile(&dataArray);
 CryptDevice deviceFilter(&bufferUsedLikeAFile);
 deviceFilter.open(QIODevice::WriteOnly);
 QTextStream stream(&deviceFilter);
 QString szText = rawText->toPlainText();
 stream << szText;

Decryption

 QBuffer bufferUsedLikeAFile(&dataArray);
 CryptDevice deviceFilter(&bufferUsedLikeAFile);
 deviceFilter.open(QIODevice::ReadOnly);
 QTextStream stream(&deviceFilter);
 QString szText = stream.readAll();
 decryptedText->setPlainText(szText);

Example image of the test app:

The Custom I/O Device

Writing a custom QIODevice class in Qt 4 involves inheriting QIODevice and then reimplementing a set of virtual functions.

There is a big difference regarding writing a custom IO device compared to Qt 3: you only have to rewrite 2 functions:

• qint64 QIODevice::readData ( char * data, qint64 maxSize )
• qint64 QIODevice::writeData ( const char * data, qint64 maxSize )

Our CryptDevice class will be a sequential I/O device. Whether it's synchronous or asynchronous depends on the underlying QIODevice.

Source Code

The class definition looks like this:

class CryptDevice : public QIODevice
{
 Q_OBJECT
public:
 CryptDevice(QIODevice* deviceToUse, QObject* parent = 0);
 bool open(OpenMode mode);
 void close();
 bool isSequential() const;
protected:
 qint64 readData(char* data, qint64 maxSize);
 qint64 writeData(const char* data, qint64 maxSize);
private:
 QIODevice* underlyingDevice;
 Q_DISABLE_COPY(CryptDevice)
};

The constructor definition is pretty straightforward

CryptDevice::CryptDevice(QIODevice* deviceToUse, QObject* parent) :
 QIODevice(parent),
 underlyingDevice(deviceToUse)
{
}

As our device should be sequential, we re-implement isSequential

bool CryptDevice::isSequential() const
{
 return true;
}

In

open()

, we open the underlying device if it's not already open and set the device state to mode.

bool CryptDevice::open(OpenMode mode)
{
 bool underlyingOk;
 if (underlyingDevice->isOpen())
 underlyingOk = (underlyingDevice->openMode() != mode);
 else
 underlyingOk = underlyingDevice->open(mode);

if (underlyingOk)
 {
 setOpenMode(mode);
 return true;
 }
 return false;
}

Closing is trivial.

void CryptDevice::close()
{
 underlyingDevice->close();
 setOpenMode(NotOpen);
}

When reading a block, we call

read()

on the underlying device. At the end, we XOR each byte read from the device with the magic constant 0x5E.

qint64 CryptDevice::readData(char* data, qint64 maxSize)
{
 qint64 deviceRead = underlyingDevice->read(data, maxSize);
 if (deviceRead == –1)
 return -1;
 for (qint64 i = 0; i < deviceRead; +''i)
 data[i] = data[i] ^ 0x5E;

 return deviceRead;
}

When writing a block, we create a temporary buffer with the XOR'd data. A more efficient implementation would use a 4096-byte buffer on the stack and call

write()

multiple times if size is larger than the buffer.

qint64 CryptDevice::writeData(const char* data, qint64 maxSize)
{
 QByteArray buffer((int)maxSize, 0);
 for (int i = 0; i < (int)maxSize;''+i)
 buffer[i] = data[i] ^ 0x5E;
 return underlyingDevice->write(buffer.data(), maxSize);
}