I always thought a dock widget was kind of self-contained or affecting an MDI window. The fact that QDockWidget or QMainWindow doesn’t really provide an easy way to get to that information kind of suggests to me that the Qt guys didn’t intend it to be used that way :). I don’t know what the desired behavior of your system is, but I think I would try to find another (maybe nicer) way of handling it.

However, you can probably catch some focus event in each widget and emit a signal that it has received focus.

Yes, it doesn’t seem to be intended to be used that way. I’m considering alternatives.

I could go with giving each dock widget its own buttons for the TreeView specific actions. But then the question of how to handle keyboard shortcuts would arise.

I also could create my own “active dock widget attribute” and let the user manually set the active dock. Is that a recommended practice? (It might have appeared to you that I’m doing my first steps with Qt ;-)… )

Also, I’m not even sure dock widgets can even be “focused” (but the widgets inside them sure can).

A dock widget is a widget just like all others. But it is indeed probably more useful to get the focus state of the widgets inside them.

I’m hiding the dock widgets on my main window with:

If I select the 3rd tab in my dock widgets, hide and then re-show them, then the 1st tab will be selected.
If I again hide then show them, then this time the 3rd tab will be selected!

So how can I stop that? If I could get the currently selected tab then I could set that one to be active again afterwards. I’m tempted to actually think this might be a Qt Bug… :p

I found this:

Although quite why there’s no method to get that property, I don’t know… And it’s also not specific enough.

There is bound to be a method for the visibility property. A QDockWidget is a QWidget itself. QWidget has the property, so QDockWidget has it as well (probably even requires it).

Yeah I don’t mean when the dock widget can be seen, but I mean when the dock widget is the selected one on top in a set of tabs.

I wrote this small example (click here [qtcentre.org] – run qmake/make) to show what I mean. Just click show/hide button and notice your currently selected tab position. Is this a Qt bug?

Interesting… It seems to be switching to the previously selected widget. Can’t say if it’s a bug though. I’d need to check a bit more. You could do a search through the bug tracker though.

This [bugreports.qt.nokia.com] is the closest bug I could find. Seems QDockWidgets are rather sparse in their api so far :) No way to see who’s on top, get the tab orderings, find the layout of several dock widgets in the same area :)

I found the answer:
http://developer.qt.nokia.com/faq/answer/how_can_i_check_which_tab_is_the_current_one_in_a_tabbed_qdockwidget [developer.qt.nokia.com]

How can I see if a QDockWidget belongs to a particular tab bar?
EDIT: this http://doc.trolltech.com/4.7/qtabwidget.html [doc.trolltech.com]
(see indexOf(widget))

EDIT2: Or not. Spoke too soon!!! QDockWidgets use QTabBar but they don’t use QTabWidget! So how am I meant to see which QDockWidget belongs to which QTabBar so I can restore the state? Very frustrating :(

Here is my saving code (saving tab positions)

In that snippet ‘yay’ is never printed, indicating that no QTabWidget’s exist and that QDockWidget doesn’t use that for tabifying itself.

And here is the restoration code:

any ideas?

Can Qt add a QMainWindow::setDockAreaVisible(Qt::DockWidgetArea area, bool visible) to their API?

Looking at:

http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt/blobs/4.7/src/gui/widgets/qdockarealayout_p.h

It looks like a trivial change:
add to

And add to QMainWindow::setVisible(area, bool) which does:
layoutState.dockAreaLayout.setVisible(toDockPos(area), bool);
invalidate();

Hiding/showing a sidepanel is such a common use-case :) This is a really needed feature.

I made a bug report here [bugreports.qt.nokia.com]

Maybe it’s time to (do a feature request|develop it yourself and do a merge request) for that. I’m not sure these suggestions will be picked up from devnet.