Qt: QStackedWidget solution
- by Martin
I'm building a Qt application that have about 30 different views (QWidgets). My idea is to use a QStackedWidget to make it easy to switch between the different views in the application. I have two different solutions of how to implement this and use as little memory as possible when the user navigates through the application.
Solution 1:
Everytime I need to show a view I check if it is already in the stack. (The user might open the same view many times, maybe a view showing an item from a database). If the view is in the stack already it doesn't need to be created again and I can just show the view.
The good thing with this solution is that I reuse the views (widgets) so they only need to be created once. This is good as the UI and other stuff should look the same everytime the user show a view, so why not reuse it? The problem with this solution is that every view has childrens. Maybe an object, a QList with objects or other things. A good thing with Qt is that you can use the parent-children mechanism so that the children will be deleted when the parent is deleted. As I never delete the parent (view) I need to handle this myself as the children might need to be deleted from different times when the view is shown. (Maybe the view show a list with objects and the list should be updated from a database each time the view is shown.)
Solution 2:
Everytime I need to show a QWidget I create a new one and show it. When it is not shown anymore, I delete it from memory.
This is a quite easy solution. And as I delete the views when they are not shown both the view and it's children should be deleted from memory so it shouldn't increase memory, am I right?
Which one of the solutions do you recommend?