What is the best practices in switching between application windows in Qt?

Question

I have an application with the following UI forms deriving from QMainWindow

• LoginWindow
• TasksWindow
• DetailsWindow

I'm supposed to login into the application in the LoginWindow where I will move to the TasksWindow. In the TasksWindow, I will choose an item from a combo box, and then I should move to the DetailsWindow and populate data related to that item. On the DetailsWindow, I will have a menu action to return me back to the TasksWindow.

Currently, what I have in mind (and what I've tried) is this. In the main.cpp:

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    QApplication app(argc, argv);
    LoginWindow loginWindow;
    loginWindow.showMaximized();

    return app.exec();
}

And in the LoginWindow push button:

void LoginWindow::on_loginButton_clicked()
{
        this->hide(); // hide the login window
        TasksWindow tasksWindow;
        tasksWindow.showMaximized();
}

is there a better way to do this? It is becoming unmanageable as now I have to include a reference to each window class that I'm supposed to go to, possibly creating circular references!

Note that I'm doing this and compiling the application to be a Qt Symbian application.

What is the best way to switch between application windows? I thought about using a QStackedWidget before, and actually tried it, but the problem then is that I would have to write all the code for handling the different events in the same file and also, the action menus are different across the windows.

Help! :)

Answer 1

It might be besides the point/question, but I would use modal dialogs for the login and details windows.

Answer 2

My suggestion is to use State Machine to manager all your status. It's fairly easy to extend also.

1. Read the State Machine Framework documents in Qt Help.
2. After you have some basic knowledge on Qt state machine framework, you may understand the approach below.

a.) Define necessary state, e.g. Guest, Logged In, Logged Out. You may have 3 dialogs (I defined an additional logged out dialog here) for each state, connect the state entered signal to dialog show slot, and connect state exited signal to dialog hide slot. In this way you don't need to worry about when to show/hide a dialog, just focus on the transition of states.

b). Define signals for dialogs, for example, signal "loggedIn" for loginWindow, signal "loggedOut" for TasksWindow, add a transition trigged by signal "loggedIn" from state Guest to Logged in.

c). So the initial state of the state machine is "guest", when this state entered, your loginWindow shows up. After log in information has been verfied, a "loggedIn" signal emitted, and the state of the machine will change from "guest" to "Logged In", so the loginWindow will be hide when "Guest" state exited, and your TasksWindow will show up when "Logged In" state entered.

d). You may end the session by clicking "log out" in your TasksWindow, also what you need to do is to define trisitions for states change.

e). A trick here: You can define a final state and connect the "finished" or "stopped" signal of the state machine to your application "quit" slot. Then after you have done all the things, the application will be closed automatically by state machine.

Easy to maintence and extend, and the logic is very clear by using state machine.