Python Pyqt Signals Slot
- QtCore.SIGNAL and QtCore.SLOT macros allow Python to interface with Qt signal and slot delivery mechanisms. This is the old way of using signals and slots. The example below uses the well known clicked signal from a QPushButton. The connect method has a non python-friendly syntax.
- Each PyQt widget, which is derived from QObject class, is designed to emit ‘signal’ in response to one or more events. The signal on its own does not perform any action. Instead, it is ‘connected’ to a ‘slot’. The slot can be any callable Python function. Using Qt Designer's Signal/Slot Editor.
- Buttons (QPushButton) can be added to any window. The QPushButton class has the method setText for its label and move(x,y) for the position. In this article you can see how a button can be added to a window, and how you can connect methods to it. Related Course: Create GUI Apps with Python PyQt5. PyQt Button Example Signals.
- The Signal class provides a way to declare and connect Qt signals in a pythonic way. PySide adopt PyQt’s new signal and slot syntax as-is. The PySide implementation is functionally compatible with the PyQt 4.5 one, with the exceptions listed bellow.
(6 replies) Hi, I'm just starting to get to grips with PyQt, and I'm having a bit of trouble connecting slots / signals, or understanding how I should do so to achieve what I am after. I am trying to write an application that will display a sequence of dialogs, with back / next / cancel buttons to step through the dialogs.
Recently, I was writing an integration test for a data visualization GUI. The GUI calls out to an external process to run a simulation, waits for the simulator to produce data, and reads the data back in to produce pretty graphs, export data to other formats, etc. I use a PySide signal to inform the GUI that the simulator has produced data. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a clean way to have my integration test wait for that signal. Luckily, I have found the solution, and I’ll explain it here.
Signals and Slots
PySide and PyQt are Python bindings to the Qt GUI and application framework. One killer feature of Qt is the signal & slot system, which is a way for widgets and objects to communicate events to one another.
An object in Qt can send a signal to other subscribed objects. Signals are used to inform other objects that an event has occurred. For example, buttons fire the QPushButton.pressed signal when they are clicked. When you want to handle a button click, you connect the signal to a function. You can create your own signals, and connect them to arbitrary python functions. In my GUI, I have something like the following:
In this code snippet, we create the Simulator and DataReader classes, and connect them together using a signal. The Simulator class is a QObject, so it can send signals. It runs a simulation in a separate process, and then emits the finished signal when it’s done. We also happen to use a button that starts the simulation when clicked. We connect the simulator’s finished signal to the DataReader so it knows when to begin reading data.
Python Pyqt Signal Slot
The Test
So, how do I test the above code? I want to run the simulator and make sure it has the correct output. I initially wrote a test like this:
What’s wrong here? The assertion line is executed too early; the simulator probably hasn’t even started in the nanoseconds between when I told it to start and when I check the data! How can we solve this issue? I tried a time.sleep() loop that polls if the simulation is complete. This blocks the main GUI thread, and is not a good solution. I also tried similar things using the threading module, but to no avail. It turns out, we can use a new Qt event loop to stop execution.
Solution
I figured out that you can call QEventLoop.exec_() to create a nested event loop. That is, our QApplication instance event loop is already running, but calling QEventLoop.exec_() will stop execution using a new event loop until QEventLoop.quit() is called. Here is our modified example test:
We create an event loop that will help us wait for our simulation to complete. When run_simulation() is called, we wait at the loop.exec_() line until finished is emitted. When the simulator finishes, the event loop will exit, and we will advance beyond the loop.exec_() line.
General Solution
There is one problem with this approach. What if simulator.finished is never emitted, like when an error occurs? We would never advance beyond loop.exec_(). If we had this test running on a continuous integration server, we would lock up a job forever until we realized the test never finished!
A solution is to use the QTimer.singleShot() function with a timeout. That means for every time we want to create an event loop, we have to set up the loop, hook up our signals, and create a timer with a suitable timeout in case the signals never fire. Here is a context manager that can handle this for us:
We can use it like this:
Isn’t that great? I think so.
pytest-qt
I run my tests using the pytest library. There is a plugin for pytest called pytest-qt, which comes with a fixture called qtbot. A qtbot is used to handle all of the boilerplate that comes along with testing PySide/PyQt code, like:
- Setting up a QApplication
- Simulating mouse clicks and keyboard interaction
- Closing windows after tests
Once I figured out how to stop test execution to wait for a signal, I created a pull request to add this functionality to pytest-qt. I created a more general solution that allows multiple signals, or none at all (just wait for a timeout). If you use PySide/PyQt, but you think testing your GUI code is a pain, check out pytest-qt! Take a look at the example in the docs to see how to use pytest-qt to block tests for signals.
Thanks for reading!