Quick start guide¶

The following quick start guide will introduce you to Qt Designer basics. Itwill show how to create a simple custom feature form for a vector layer in QGIS.

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Open Qt Designer using any of the available shortcuts in your computer.
By default, Qt Designer will show the New Form dialog on opening.
Choose DialogwithButtonsBottom from the templateformslist and press Create.
Have a quick look into the Qt Designer‘s graphical user interface (GUI):
- In the middle of the screen, you will find the recently created newdialog, a blank form with only a pair of ok-cancel buttons (1).
- On the right-hand side of the screen you will find theWidget box which lists all available widgets (2). This listcan be used to insert widgets by simply dragging and dropping them ontop of the dialog.
- In the left-hand side (among others) there’s the PropertyEditor (3), that can be used to edit the properties of the dialog itselfor of each inserted widgets.
- Finally, in the top, near the menus, you will find the Formstoolbar(4), which we will use to impose some alignment layout forconsistency purposes.
Note
In Mac OS X, Qt Designer starts up in Multiple Top-Level Windowsmode by default, looking very different from what is presented above. Tochange it, you should go to Designer ‣ Preferences..and choose DockedWindow in the User Interface Mode.
To see what widgets we want to use on the new form, we will need to inspectthe data’s attributes and the layer’s current feature form.
Open QGIS by using any of the available shortcuts in your computer.
Click the Add Vector layers button in the Manage layersToolbar (or use the Layer ‣ Add Layer ‣ Add VectorLayer..) to browse to the events.shp shapefile location. (see QGISQuick start guide if you need help with this task)
Right-click the recently loaded layer’s name in the Layerspanel and choose the option Open attribute table. Then, takesome time noticing the layer’s field names and types.
Let’s now have a look at the layer’s current feature form. Go back to QGISmain window, select the events layer and click Toggle editingin the digitising toolbar (if not visible check View ‣Toolbars ‣ Digitizing toolbar). In the same toolbar, select theAdd Feature tool and click anywhere in the map canvas to add anew point to your layer. This step should insert a point in the map canvasand show the default layer’s feature form. Take some time analysing thefeature form and then press Cancel to discard any changes.
Let’s go back to Qt Designer and add the necessary widgets for the firstfield: name.
We will start by adding a text label to our form. Scroll down theWidget box to locate the Label widget in theDisplay widgets group. Now, drag and drop it on the form. You can changethe label’s text either by double-clicking label itself and typing or usingthe Property Editor, more precisely at the Textproperty. Set the value to Event'sname. If necessary, expand thelabel box using the small squares in its border.
Now let’s add an input widget for the name field. This time, instead ofscrolling down the Widget box to locate the widget, try typinglineedit on the filter bar at the top of it. Drag and drop aLine edit widget to be right below of the label.
Repeat steps 7 and 8, for the venue field (or just select both existingwidgets pressing the Ctrl key, and copy (Ctrl+c) and paste(Ctrl+v). Use Event'svenue for the label, and put bothLabel and Line edit widgets below the other two.
Finally, let’s add some special QGIS input widgets and respective labelsto control the date fields. Using any of the two options described in steps7 and 8, find and insert two QgsDateTimeEdit widgets. Put themside by side, and above them add the labels Start date and End date.Your form should look similar to the one in the following figure:

To connect this dialog’s input widgets to the QGIS layer’s fields, we need toset their objectName property’s value with the same name as thetarget field. As you will see, this can be done in several different ways.

Select the Name of eventLine edit and in theProperty Editor set the value of the objectNameproperty to name.
Right-click the Venue of the eventLine edit, and chooseChange objectName. Set the value to have the name of the secondfield: venue.
For QgsDateTimeEdit widgets simply use the ObjectInspector located above the Property Editor. Double-click ontheir current names and change them to start_date and end_date
By now, all your input widgets should have the name of the correspondingfields, and in the Object Inspector you should have somethingsimilar to the next figure.
We are almost finished. All we need to do now is align all widgets so thatthey look good together. For that, we will use a grid layout.
Right-click anywhere on the dialog’s empty space (this will switch anyfocus over the widgets to the dialog instead) and chooselayout ‣ Layout in a grid (or use the toolbar). Afterthat, all widgets should be aligned according to their relative place toeach others.
After you have applied the grid layout, you can now resize the form tomake it more compact, by click and move the bottom-left-corner of the form.
Finally, using File ‣ Save as. let’s save the formusing a suggestive name, for instance events_form.ui. For easydiscovery, save it in the same folder that the data is located.
Now, let’s go back to QGIS and test the feature form in action.
In QGIS, right-click the layer’s name in the Layers panel andchoose Properties. Go to the Fields tab and in theAttribute editor layout select the Provideui-file option.Then, in the Edit UI browse to the events_form.ui location.Finally, press Ok to apply the changes and close the layer’sproperties dialog.
Assuming that the events layer is still in editing mode, let’s use theAdd feature again to create a new point in the map canvas. Thistime, it should open the customised feature form created in Qt designerwith all its widgets.
To finish our feature form, let’s make a small fix in the date fieldsotherwise the values won’t be saved in the table because of the use ofdifferent date formats in Qt form and QGIS.
Back in Qt Designer, select the two QgsDateTimeEdit widgets(Hold the Ctrl key while clicking) and, in the PropertiesEditor set the Display format value to yyyy-M-dd and checkthe calendarPopup property. The changes will be applied onboth widgets. Save the form again.
Back in QGIS, go to the fields tab in the Properties menu and for eachdate field change the widget to date/time. Make sure to use the same dateformat value in the Widget display as the one used in the form(yyyy-MM-dd). Also select the calendar popup andallow NULL options. Press Ok when you have finished.
Now, repeat step #17 to see the feature form changes take effect. The datevalues should be represented differently and a new icon will alow to choosethe date from a popup calendar. Besides, saving the input to the tablewill now work fine.

A lot more form customizations can be done using Qt Designer. You can usemany different widgets, organise the widgets in groups or tabs, and you caneven add some Python logic to make your forms responsive.

macOS (previously known as OS X or Mac OS X) is Apple's operating system for the Mac line of computers. It's a UNIX platform, based on the Darwin kernel, and behaves largely similar to other UNIX-like platforms. The main difference is that X11 is not used as the windowing system. Instead, macOS uses its own native windowing system that is accessible through the Cocoa API.

To download and install Qt for macOS, follow the instructions on the Getting Started with Qt page.

Supported Versions

When talking about version support on macOS, it's important to distinguish between the build environment; the platform you're building on or with, and the target platforms; the platforms you are building for. The following macOS versions are supported.

Target Platform	Architecture	Build Environment
macOS 10.13, 10.14, 10.15	`x86_64` and `x86_64h`	Xcode 11 (10.15 SDK)

Build Environment

The build environment on macOS is defined entirely by the Xcode version used to build your application. Xcode contains both a toolchain (compiler, linker, and other tools), and a macOS platform-SDK (headers and libraries). Together these define how your application is built.

Note: The version of macOS that you are running Xcode on does not matter. As long as Apple ships a given Xcode version that runs on your operating system, the build environment will be defined by that Xcode version.

Xcode can be downloaded from Apple's developer website (including older versions of Xcode). Once installed, choosing an Xcode installation is done using the xcode-select tool.

You can inspect the globally selected Xcode installation using the same tool.

The xcrun command can then be used to find a particular tool in the toolchain.

or show the platform SDK path used when building.

Target Platforms

Building for macOS utilizes a technique called weak linking that allows you to build your application against the headers and libraries of the latest platform SDK, while still allowing your application to be deployed to macOS versions lower than the SDK version. When the binary is run on a macOS version lower than the SDK it was built with, Qt will check at runtime whether or not a platform feature is available before utilizing it.

In theory this would allow running your application on every single macOS version released, but for practical (and technical) reasons there is a lower limit to this range, known as the deployment target of your application. If the binary is launched on a macOS version below the deployment target macOS or Qt will give an error message and the application will not run.

Qt expresses the deployment target via the QMAKE_MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET qmake variable, which has a default value set via the makespec for macOS. You should not need to change this default, but if needed you can increase it in your project file:

Note: You should not lower the deployment target beyond the default value set by Qt. Doing so will likely lead to crashes at runtime if the binary is then deployed to a macOS version lower than what Qt expected to run on.

By always building against the latest available platform SDK, you ensure that Qt can take advantage of new features introduced in recent versions of macOS.

For more information about SDK-based development on macOS, see Apple's developer documentation.

Opting out of macOS behavior changes

One caveat to using the latest Xcode version and SDK to build your application is that macOS's system frameworks will sometimes decide whether or not to enable behavior changes based on the SDK you built your application with.

For example, when dark-mode was introduced in macOS 10.14 Mojave, macOS would only treat applications built against the 10.14 SDK as supporting dark-mode, and would leave applications built against earlier SDKs with the default light mode look. This technique allows Apple to ensure that binaries built long before the new SDK and operating system was released will still continue to run without regressions on new macOS releases.

A consequence of this is that if Qt has problems dealing with some of these macOS features (dark-mode, layer-backed views), the only way to opt out of them is building with an earlier SDK (the 10.13 SDK, available through Xcode 9). This is a last-resort solution, and should only be applied if your application has no other ways of working around the problem.

Architectures

By default, Qt is built for x86_64. To build for x86_64h (Haswell). use the QMAKE_APPLE_DEVICE_ARCHSqmake variable. This is selectable at configure time:

QMAKE_APPLE_DEVICE_ARCHS can also be specified as a space-delimited list in order to build for multiple architectures simultaneously:

Additional Command-Line Options

On the command-line, applications can be built using qmake and make. Optionally, qmake can generate project files for Xcode with -spec macx-xcode. If you are using the binary package, qmake generates Xcode projects by default; use -spec macx-gcc to generate makefiles. For example:

Configuring with -spec macx-xcode generates an Xcode project file from project.pro. With qmake you do not have to worry about rules for Qt's preprocessors (moc and uic) since qmake automatically handles them and ensures that everything necessary is linked into your application.

Qt For Mac Download

Qt does not entirely interact with the development environment (for example plugins to set a file to 'mocable' from within the Xcode user interface).

The result of the build process is an application bundle, which is a directory structure that contains the actual application executable. The application can be launched by double-clicking it in Finder, or by referring directly to its executable from the command line, for example, myApp.app/Contents/MacOS/myApp.

If you wish to have a command-line tool that does not use the GUI for example, moc, uic or ls, you can tell qmake to disable bundle creation from the CONFIG variable in the project file:

Deploying Applications on macOS

macOS applications are typically deployed as self-contained application bundles. The application bundle contains the application executable as well as dependencies such as the Qt libraries, plugins, translations and other resources you may need. Third party libraries like Qt are normally not installed system-wide; each application provides its own copy.

A common way to distribute applications is to provide a compressed disk image (.dmg file) that the user can mount in Finder. The deployment tool, macdeployqt (available from the macOS installers), can be used to create the self-contained bundles, and optionally also create a .dmg archive. Applications can also be distributed through the Mac App Store. Qt 5 aims to stay within the app store sandbox rules. macdeployqt (bin/macdeployqt) can be used as a starting point for app store deployment.

Note: For selling applications in the macOS App Store, special rules apply. In order to pass validation, the application must verify the existence of a valid receipt before executing any code. Since this is a copy protection mechanism, steps should be taken to avoid common patterns and obfuscate the code that validates the receipt as much as possible. Thus, this cannot be automated by Qt, but requires some platform-specific code written specifically for the application itself. More information can be found in Apple's documentation.

macOS Issues

The page below covers specific issues and recommendations for creating macOS applications.

Where to Go from Here

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