Release month, qpropgen 0.1.1
written on Sunday, December 9, 2018
Continuing on this release month idea started last week, here is a release of another project. Today is the first release of qpropgen, a tool to generate QML-friendly QObject-based C++ classes from class definition files.
I started this project because I did not want to manually define the dozen of properties required to represent a sound in SFXR-Qt, which itself got started because I wanted a sound effect generator for Pixel Wheels. Yes, that's a bit of Yak shaving :)
It works this way: first you define your class and its properties in a yaml file:
class: Person
properties:
- name: firstName
type: QString
- name: lastName
type: QString
- name: birthDate
type: QDateTime
Then you run qpropgen person.yaml. It produces two files: person.h and person.cpp.
This is person.h:
// This file has been generated with qpropgen, any changes made to it will be lost!
#ifndef PERSON_H
#define PERSON_H
#include <QObject>
class Person : public QObject {
Q_OBJECT
Q_PROPERTY(QString firstName READ firstName
WRITE setFirstName
NOTIFY firstNameChanged
)
Q_PROPERTY(QString lastName READ lastName
WRITE setLastName
NOTIFY lastNameChanged
)
Q_PROPERTY(QDateTime birthDate READ birthDate
WRITE setBirthDate
NOTIFY birthDateChanged
)
public:
explicit Person(QObject* parent = nullptr);
QString firstName() const;
void setFirstName(const QString& value);
QString lastName() const;
void setLastName(const QString& value);
QDateTime birthDate() const;
void setBirthDate(const QDateTime& value);
signals:
void firstNameChanged(const QString& firstName);
void lastNameChanged(const QString& lastName);
void birthDateChanged(const QDateTime& birthDate);
private:
QString mFirstName;
QString mLastName;
QDateTime mBirthDate;
};
#endif // PERSON_H
And this is person.cpp:
// This file has been generated with qpropgen, any changes made to it will be lost!
#include <person.h>
Person::Person(QObject* parent)
: QObject(parent) {
}
QString Person::firstName() const {
return mFirstName;
}
void Person::setFirstName(const QString& value) {
if (mFirstName == value) {
return;
}
mFirstName = value;
firstNameChanged(value);
}
QString Person::lastName() const {
return mLastName;
}
void Person::setLastName(const QString& value) {
if (mLastName == value) {
return;
}
mLastName = value;
lastNameChanged(value);
}
QDateTime Person::birthDate() const {
return mBirthDate;
}
void Person::setBirthDate(const QDateTime& value) {
if (mBirthDate == value) {
return;
}
mBirthDate = value;
birthDateChanged(value);
}
qpropgen comes with a CMake file to include in your project. Contributions adding support for other build systems are greatly appreciated :)
There is more to it: you can define read-only properties, make setters and getters virtual and a few other tweaks. You can learn more about qpropgen from the README.
Let me know if you find this tool useful!