Using Qt signals/slots instead of a worker thread
- by Rob
I am using Qt and wish to write a class that will perform some network-type operations, similar to FTP/HTTP. The class needs to connect to lots of machines, one after the other but I need the applications UI to stay (relatively) responsive during this process, so the user can cancel the operation, exit the application, etc. My first thought was to use a separate thread for network stuff but the built-in Qt FTP/HTTP (and other) classes apparently avoid using threads and instead rely on signals and slots. So, I'd like to do something similar and was hoping I could do something like this:
class Foo : public QObject
{
Q_OBJECT
public:
void start();
signals:
void next();
private slots:
void nextJob();
};
void Foo::start()
{
...
connect(this, SIGNAL(next()), this, SLOT(nextJob()));
emit next();
}
void Foo::nextJob()
{
// Process next 'chunk'
if (workLeftToDo)
{
emit next();
}
}
void Bar::StartOperation()
{
Foo* foo = new Foo;
foo->start();
}
However, this doesn't work and UI freezes until all operations have completed. I was hoping that emitting signals wouldn't actually call the slots immediately but would somehow be queued up by Qt, allowing the main UI to still operate.
So what do I need to do in order to make this work? How does Qt achieve this with the multitude of built-in classes that appear to perform lengthy tasks on a single thread?
