While working on ape I had a problem with figuring out how to properly connect a signal to a slot, where the signal is emitted by a QTreeView widget. As this is not my first app with python and pyqt, I was doing something like (this is, btw, the “old style”):

self.connect(widget, SIGNAL("emitted_signal()"), self.my_slot)

but it simply didn’t work. Nothing happened. I was trying all different of connect/signal/slot combinations but everything was just dead silent. Google gave only pretty much old posts talking about QT3. Then I figured that, because the QTreeView is “sitting” inside a QDockWidget, maybe that dock widget thingy is somehow intercepting/taking over the signals. Nope. Wth? Wtf is going on? Current pyqt version is (on my machine) 4.6. Last time I used pyqt it was something like 4.2 or 4.3. Something must’ve been changed in the mean time. Off to the pyqt docs I go (btw, I use the official QT docs, the C++ version, there isn’t really a big difference from pyqt): PyQt reference, chapter 7 - "New-style Signal and Slot Support". A-ha! They changed it! Here is an example of the “new style”:

widget.emmited_signal.connect(self.my_slot)

Oh my, isn’t that just beautiful?! Much more readable and simpler, for me at least. And it works! Yay! The QTreeView signals are happily connected to slots, thus, I’m happy too.

A few paragraphs later, turns out that the “old style” isn’t thrown out, it should still work. Why it didn’t work for me escapes me at the moment, but honestly, I don’t really care as long as the new style is working.

Happy hackin’!

Tags: ape, pyqt, python, signals, slots.