Imagine we want an editor that has undo and redo capability. But the operations on the editor are all asynchronous. This implies that also undo and redo are asynchronous operations.

Combining QFuture with QUndoCommand made a lot of sense for us. The undo and the redo methods of the QUndoCommand can also be asynchronous, of course. We wanted to use QFuture without involving threads, because our asynchronosity is done through a process and IPC, and not a thread. It’s the design mistake of QtConcurrent‘s run method, in my opinion. That meant using QFutureInterface instead (which is undocumented, but luckily public – so it’ll remain with us until at least Qt’s 6.y.z releases).

So how do we make a QUndoCommand that has a undo, and that has a redo method that returns a asynchronous QFuture<ResultType>?

We just did that, today. I’m very satisfied with the resulting API and design. It might have helped if QUndoStack would be a QUndoStack<T> and QUndoCommand would have been a QUndoCommand<T> with undo and redo’s return type being T. Just an idea for the Qt 6.y.z developers.

Among the problems we’ll face is that we want asynchronous APIs that are undoable and that we want to switch to read only, undoable editing, non-undoable editing and that QML doesn’t really work well with QFuture. At least not yet. We want an interface that is easy to talk with from QML. Yet we want to switch between complicated behaviors.

Perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Imagine you have a duck. Imagine you have a wall. Now imagine you throw the duck with a lot of force against a wall. Duck typing means that the duck hitting the wall quacks like a duck would.

ps. Replace wall with API and duck with ugly stupid script written by an idiot. You can leave quacks.

MyPlugin/MyPlugin.cpp:

#include <ViewModels/MyListClass.h>
#include <ViewModels/DisplayViewModel.h>

qmlRegisterUncreatableType<MyListClass>( a_uri, 1, 0, "MyListClass",
         "Use access via DisplayViewModel instead");
qmlRegisterType<DisplayViewModel>( a_uri, 1, 0, "DisplayViewModel");

Utils/MyQMLListUtils.h

#define MY_DECLARE_QML_LIST(type, name, owner, prop) \
QQmlListProperty<type> name(){ \
   return QQmlListProperty<type>( \
               this, 0,&owner::count ## type ## For ## name ## List, \
               &owner::at ## type ## For ## name ## List); \
} \
static int count ## type ## For ## name ## List(QQmlListProperty<type>*property){ \
   owner *m = qobject_cast<owner *>(property->object); \
   return m->prop.size(); \
} \
static type *at ## type ## For ## name ## List( \
        QQmlListProperty<type>*property, int index){ \
   owner *m = qobject_cast<owner *>(property->object); \
   return m->prop[index]; \
}

ViewModels/DisplayViewModel.h

#ifndef DISPLAYVIEWMODEL_H
#define DISPLAYVIEWMODEL_H

#include <QObject>
#include <QtQml>
#include <ViewModels/MyListClass.h>
#include <Utils/MyQMLListUtils.h>

class DisplayViewModel : public QObject
{
    Q_OBJECT

    Q_PROPERTY(constQString title READ title WRITE setTitle NOTIFY titleChanged )
    Q_PROPERTY(constQList<MyListClass*> objects READ objects
                                          NOTIFY objectsChanged ) 
    Q_PROPERTY( QQmlListProperty<MyListClass> objectList READ objectList
                                              NOTIFY objectsChanged )
public:
    explicit DisplayViewModel( QObject *a_parent = nullptr );
    explicit DisplayViewModel( const QString &a_title,
                               QList<MyListClass*> a_objects,
                               QObject *a_parent = nullptr );
    const QString title()
        { return m_title; }
    void setTitle( const QString &a_title ); 
    const QList<MyListClass*> objects ()
        { return m_objects; } 
    Q_INVOKABLE void appendObject( MyListClass *a_object);
    Q_INVOKABLE void deleteObject( MyListClass *a_object);
    Q_INVOKABLE void reset( );

protected:
    MY_DECLARE_QML_LIST(MyListClass, objectList, DisplayViewModel, m_objects)

signals:
    void titleChanged();
    void objectsChanged();

private:
    QString m_title;
    QList<MyListObject*> m_objects;
};

#endif// DISPLAYVIEWMODEL_H

DisplayViewModel.cpp

#include "DisplayViewModel.h"

DisplayViewModel::DisplayViewModel( const QString &a_title,
                                    QList<MyListClass*> a_objects,
                                    QObject *a_parent )
    : QObject ( a_parent )
    , m_title ( a_title )
    , m_objects ( a_objects )
{
    foreach (MyListClass* mobject, m_objects) {
        mobject->setParent (this);
    }
}

void DisplayViewModel::setTitle (const QString &a_title )
{
    if ( m_title != a_title ) {
        m_title = a_title;
        emit titleChanged();
    }
}

void DisplayViewModel::reset( )
{
    foreach ( MyListClass *mobject, m_objects ) {
        mobject->deleteLater();
    }
    m_objects.clear();
    emit objectsChanged();
}

void DisplayViewModel::appendObject( MyListClass *a_object )
{
    a_object->setParent( this );
    m_objects.append( a_object );
    emit objectsChanged();
}

void DisplayViewModel::deleteObject( MyListClass *a_object )
{
    if (m_objects.contains( a_object )) {
        m_objects.removeOne( a_object );
        a_object->deleteLater();
        emit objectsChanged();
    }
}

Tester.cpp

#include <ViewModels/DisplayViewModel.h>
#include <ViewModels/MyListClass.h>

QList<MyListClass*> objectList;
for( int i = 0; i < 100 ; ++i ) {
    objectList.append ( new MyListClass (i) );
}
DisplayViewModel *viewModel = new DisplayViewModel (objectList);
viewModel->appendObject ( new MyListClass (101) );

Display.qml

import QtQuick 2.5
import MyPlugin 1.0

Repeater { 
    property DisplayViewModel viewModel: DisplayViewModel { } 
    model: viewModel.objectList
    delegate: Item {
        property MyListClass object: modelData
        Text {
            text: object.property
        }
    }
}

As we all know does mmap, or even worse on Windows CreateFileMapping, need contiguous virtual address space for a given mapping size. That can become a problem when you want to load a file of a gigabyte with mmap.

The solution is of course to mmap the big file using multiple mappings. For example like adapting yesterday’s demo this way:

void FileModel::setFileName(const QString &fileName)
{
    ...
    if (m_file->open(QIODevice::ReadOnly)) {
        if (m_file->size() > MAX_MAP_SIZE) {
            m_mapSize = MAX_MAP_SIZE;
            m_file_maps.resize(1 + m_file->size() / MAX_MAP_SIZE, nullptr);
        } else {
            m_mapSize = static_cast(m_file->size());
            m_file_maps.resize(1, nullptr);
        }
        ...
    } else {
        m_index->open(QFile::ReadOnly);
        m_rowCount = m_index->size() / 4;
    }
    m_file_maps[0] = m_file->map(0, m_mapSize, QFileDevice::NoOptions);
    qDebug() map(mapIndex * m_mapSize, m_mapSize, QFileDevice::NoOptions);
    position = m_file_maps[mapIndex] + map_pos_i;
    if (position) {
            const int length = static_cast(end_i - pos_i);
            char *buffer = (char*) alloca(length+1);
            if (map_end_i >= map_pos_i)
                strncpy (buffer, (char*) position, length);
            else {
                const uchar *position2 = m_file_maps[mapIndex+1];
                if (position2 == nullptr) {
                    position2 = m_file_maps[mapIndex+1] = m_file->map((mapIndex+1) *
                         m_mapSize, m_mapSize, QFileDevice::NoOptions);
                }
                strncpy (buffer, (char*) position, MAX_MAP_SIZE - map_pos_i);
                strncpy (buffer + (MAX_MAP_SIZE - map_pos_i), (char*) position2, map_end_i);
            }
            buffer[length] = 0;
            ret = QVariant(QString(buffer));
        }
    }
    return ret;
}

You could also not use mmap for the very big source text file and use m_file.seek(map_pos_i) and m_file.read(buffer, length). The most important mapping is of course the index one, as the reading of the individual lines can also be done fast enough with normal read() calls (as long as you don’t have to do it for each and every line of the very big file and as long as you know in a O(1) way where the QAbstractListModel’s index.row()’s data is).

But you already knew that. Right?

Sometimes people want to do crazy stuff like loading a gigabyte sized plain text file into a Qt view that can handle QAbstractListModel. Like for example a QML ListView. You know, the kind of files you generate with this commando:

Consider these rather simple relationships between classes

Ik beweerde onlangs ergens dat een systeem dat verbanden (waar, wanneer, met wie, waarom) in plaats van louter metadata (titel, datum, auteur, enz.) over content verzamelt een oplossing zou kunnen bieden voor het probleem dat gebruikers van digitale media meer en meer zullen hebben; namelijk dat ze teveel materiaal gaan verzameld hebben om er ooit nog eens iets snel genoeg in terug te vinden.