Is there a Qt widget to browse the hierarchy of widgets in an app (similar to Spy++)?

Question

We've got an app with a complex hierarchy of widgets and I want to be able to browse this hierarchy, view and edit properties (such as size) in a similar manner to Spy++. It doesn't need to be running in an external app, if there is a widget that can display this information. So the question is, does such a mythical beast exist?

Answer 1

The usual approach is to build such a beast in-house, using the introspection APIs, and walking the QWidget parent-child hierarchy. It's pretty easy to build a basic one; if you want to build a full property editor it's considerably more work. There's probably code you can re-use to reduce the work - possibly even the property inspector code from Designer, though it might be overkill. I've never gone as far as full GUI, due to time constraints - I've simply dumped the hierarchy and some fixed properties to stdout as text or XML.

I suppose it would be plausible to make a reusable GUI component out of this, that could be dropped into an arbitrary app, would look for top-level widgets, and allow everything to be inspected, if you have the time and inclination.