Comments on: QAwesomeness: Reflection in C++ with Qt

By: Tim Burrell

Tim Burrell — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:31:35 +0000

You can't add functions to classes at runtime; remember this is still C++ so you must abide by the rules of static binding. That being said, if you had no idea what class your current object was, you could still query it for its name and then read in some function names from a text file and call those functions (as strings):

// get the current class' meta object
QMetaObject* meta = this->metaObject(); // emphasized 'this' access to show this working on the current class
QString ClassName = meta->className();

// open the file
QFile file(ClassName + ".txt"
file.open(QIODevice::ReadOnly);
QDataStream in(&file); // allow reading serialized data from the file

QString method1, method2;
in >> method1;
in >> method2;

// invoke the methods
meta->invokeMethod(this, method1, Qt:irectConnection);
meta->invokeMethod(this, method2, Qt:irectConnection);

By: Dat Chu

Dat Chu — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 02:45:21 +0000

Thanks for the article, Tim. Would you mind posting an example or two on using Qt Reflection capability to do something useful? Something as simple as: read a txt file that has the same name as the current class name, then create a method with the names given in each line of this text file.

e.g. MyClass.txt contains 2 lines: "getName", "getTime" . I want a class called MyClass with two methods getName() and getTime() now.

By: Zack

Zack — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:32:10 +0000

Thanks for the article Tim!
Have been excited to start learning and working with QT and now I'm even more excited