Creating Custom Widgets for Qt Designer

Qt Designer's plugin-based architecture allows user-defined and third party custom widgets to be edited just like you do with standard Qt widgets. All of the custom widget's features are made available to Qt Designer, including widget properties, signals, and slots. Since Qt Designer uses real widgets during the form design process, custom widgets will appear the same as they do when previewed.

The QtDesigner module provides you with the ability to create custom widgets in Qt Designer.

Getting Started

To integrate a custom widget with Qt Designer, you require a suitable description for the widget and an appropriate project file.

Providing an Interface Description

To inform Qt Designer about the type of widget you want to provide, create a subclass of QDesignerCustomWidgetInterface that describes the various properties your widget exposes. Most of these are supplied by functions that are pure virtual in the base class, because only the author of the plugin can provide this information.

Two other virtual functions can also be reimplemented:

Notes on the domXml() Function

The domXml() function returns a UI file snippet that is used by Qt Designer's widget factory to create a custom widget and its applicable properties.

Since Qt 4.4, Qt Designer's widget box allows for a complete UI file to describe one custom widget. The UI file can be loaded using the <ui> tag. Specifying the <ui> tag allows for adding the <customwidget> element that contains additional information for custom widgets. The <widget> tag is sufficient if no additional information is required

If the custom widget does not provide a reasonable size hint, it is necessary to specify a default geometry in the string returned by the domXml() function in your subclass. For example, the AnalogClockPlugin provided by the Custom Widget Plugin example, defines a default widgetgeometry in the following way:

    ...
R"(
    <property name="geometry">
      <rect>
        <x>0</x>
        <y>0</y>
        <width>100</width>
        <height>100</height>
      </rect>
    </property>
")
    ...

An additional feature of the domXml() function is that, if it returns an empty string, the widget will not be installed in Qt Designer's widget box. However, it can still be used by other widgets in the form. This feature is used to hide widgets that should not be explicitly created by the user, but are required by other widgets.

A complete custom widget specification looks like:

<ui language="c++"> displayname="MyWidget">
    <widget class="widgets::MyWidget" name="mywidget"/>
    <customwidgets>
        <customwidget>
            <class>widgets::MyWidget</class>
            <addpagemethod>addPage</addpagemethod>
            <propertyspecifications>
                <stringpropertyspecification name="fileName" notr="true" type="singleline"/>
                <stringpropertyspecification name="text" type="richtext"/>
                <tooltip name="text">Explanatory text to be shown in Property Editor</tooltip>
            </propertyspecifications>
        </customwidget>
    </customwidgets>
</ui>

Attributes of the <ui> tag:

The <addpagemethod> tag tells Qt Designer and uic which method should be used to add pages to a container widget. This applies to container widgets that require calling a particular method to add a child rather than adding the child by passing the parent. In particular, this is relevant for containers that are not a a subclass of the containers provided in Qt Designer, but are based on the notion of Current Page. In addition, you need to provide a container extension for them.

The <propertyspecifications> element can contain a list of property meta information.

The tag <tooltip> may be used to specify a tool tip to be shown in Property Editor when hovering over the property. The property name is given in the attribute name and the element text is the tooltip. This functionality was added in Qt 5.6.

For properties of type string, the <stringpropertyspecification> tag can be used. This tag has the following attributes:

Values of the type attribute of the string property:

Plugin Requirements

In order for plugins to work correctly on all platforms, you need to ensure that they export the symbols needed by Qt Designer.

First of all, the plugin class must be exported in order for the plugin to be loaded by Qt Designer. Use the Q_PLUGIN_METADATA() macro to do this. Also, the QDESIGNER_WIDGET_EXPORT macro must be used to define each custom widget class within a plugin, that Qt Designer will instantiate.

Creating Well Behaved Widgets

Some custom widgets have special user interface features that may make them behave differently to many of the standard widgets found in Qt Designer. Specifically, if a custom widget grabs the keyboard as a result of a call to QWidget::grabKeyboard(), the operation of Qt Designer will be affected.

To give custom widgets special behavior in Qt Designer, provide an implementation of the initialize() function to configure the widget construction process for Qt Designer specific behavior. This function will be called for the first time before any calls to createWidget() and could perhaps set an internal flag that can be tested later when Qt Designer calls the plugin's createWidget() function.

Building and Installing the Plugin

A Simple Plugin

The Custom Widget Plugin demonstrates a simple Qt Designer plugin.

The project file for a plugin must specify the headers and sources for both the custom widget and the plugin interface. Typically, this file only has to specify that the plugin's project will be built as a library, but with specific plugin support for Qt Designer. For CMake, this is done with the following declarations:

find_package(Qt6 REQUIRED COMPONENTS Core Gui UiPlugin Widgets)

qt_add_plugin(customwidgetplugin)
target_sources(customwidgetplugin PRIVATE
    analogclock.cpp analogclock.h
    customwidgetplugin.cpp customwidgetplugin.h
)
target_link_libraries(customwidgetplugin PUBLIC
    Qt::Core
    Qt::Gui
    Qt::UiPlugin
    Qt::Widgets
)

The link libraries list specifies Qt::UiPlugin. This indicates that the plugin uses the abstract interfaces QDesignerCustomWidgetInterface and QDesignerCustomWidgetCollectionInterface only and has no linkage to the Qt Designer libraries. When accessing other interfaces of Qt Designer that have linkage, Designer should be used instead; this ensures that the plugin dynamically links to the Qt Designer libraries and has a run-time dependency on them.

It is also necessary to ensure that the plugin is installed together with other Qt Designer widget plugins:

   set(INSTALL_EXAMPLEDIR "${QT6_INSTALL_PREFIX}/${QT6_INSTALL_PLUGINS}/designer")
install(TARGETS customwidgetplugin
    RUNTIME DESTINATION "${INSTALL_EXAMPLEDIR}"
    BUNDLE DESTINATION "${INSTALL_EXAMPLEDIR}"
    LIBRARY DESTINATION "${INSTALL_EXAMPLEDIR}"
)

For qmake:

CONFIG      += plugin
TEMPLATE    = lib
HEADERS     = analogclock.h \
              customwidgetplugin.h
SOURCES     = analogclock.cpp \
              customwidgetplugin.cpp
OTHER_FILES += analogclock.json

The QT variable contains the keyword uiplugin, which is the equivalent of the Qt::UiPlugin library.

It is also necessary to ensure that the plugin is installed together with other Qt Designer widget plugins:

target.path = $$[QT_INSTALL_PLUGINS]/designer
INSTALLS += target

The $[QT_INSTALL_PLUGINS] variable is a placeholder to the location of the installed Qt plugins. You can configure Qt Designer to look for plugins in other locations by setting the QT_PLUGIN_PATH environment variable before running the application.

See QCoreApplication::libraryPaths() for more information about customizing paths for libraries and plugins with Qt applications.

If plugins are built in a mode that is incompatible with Qt Designer, they will not be loaded and installed. For more information about plugins, see the Plugins HOWTO document.

Splitting up the Plugin

The simple approach explained above introduces a problem particularly when using the other interfaces of Qt Designer that have linkage: The application using the custom widget will then depend on Qt Designer headers and libraries. In a real world scenario, this is not desired.

The following sections describe how to resolve this.

Linking the Widget into the Application

When using qmake, the source and header file of the custom widget can be shared between the application and Qt Designer by creating a .pri file for inclusion:

INCLUDEPATH += $$PWD
HEADERS += $$PWD/analogclock.h
SOURCES += $$PWD/analogclock.cpp

This file would then be included by the .pro file of the plugin and the application:

include(customwidget.pri)

When using CMake, the source files of the widget can similarly be added to the application project.

Sharing the Widget Using a Library

Another approach is to put the widget into a library that is linked to the Qt Designer plugin as well as to the application. It is recommended to use static libraries to avoid problems locating the library at run-time.

For shared libraries, see Creating Shared Libraries.

Using the Plugin with QUiLoader

The preferred way of adding custom widgets to QUiLoader is to subclass it reimplementing QUiLoader::createWidget().

However, it is also possible to use Qt Designer custom widget plugins (see QUiLoader::pluginPaths() and related functions). To avoid having to deploy the Qt Designer libraries onto the target device, those plugins should have no linkage to the Qt Designer libraries (QT = uiplugin, see Creating Custom Widgets for Qt Designer#BuildingandInstallingthePlugin).

Related Examples

For more information on using custom widgets in Qt Designer, refer to the Custom Widget Plugin and Task Menu Extension examples for more information about using custom widgets in Qt Designer. Also, you can use the QDesignerCustomWidgetCollectionInterface class to combine several custom widgets into a single library.