I have a QAbstractListModel that has a bunch of custom objects stored in it, and you can access the different fields of the custom objects in the model by specifying a role (if this is an improper use of Qt roles let me know because I must be confused). I want to display this data in a user friendly QTableView. I can get things displaying using a proxy model, but the issue is I don't want to display the raw values, I want to display specific data derived from the raw data. So for instance, I don't want a column for both ItemA.foo and ItemA.bar, I want to display just ItemA.foo - ItemA.bar in a single column. And to add to that, I want the automatic update functionality you get with models where if either ItemA.foo or ItemA.bar change, I want the difference column to automatically update and recalculate.

I would think that the way to do this would be to use some kind of table proxy model that listens to the source model, and then populates its own fields with the values derived from the source model and listens for dataChanged() signals from the source model. Then you plug this proxy model in to a QTableView. But to me this sounds like something that should be done in a view. Or is this something that should be done by the delegate? I could even go so far as to do these calculations in the base model itself and add roles specific to these values that should be displayed in the table, but that sounds like I am really overloading the responsibilities of the model.

TLDR: How do you manipulate data from a model in a QTableView? Should I do the data manipulation in the base model and then send that to the QTableView? Should I use a proxy model that manipulates the base data and sends it to the QTableView? Or am I completely misunderstanding something?

CodePudding user response：

and you can access the different fields of the custom objects in the model by specifying a role

If you look at the documentation for Qt::ItemDataRole, you would see that Qt models should indeed provide different data for different roles but each role means some distinguished purpose of the data corresponding to the role. For example, the most commonly used role is probably Qt::DisplayRole as the data for this role defines the content displayed in the view e.g. it's the text in the table cell. If you are satisfied with all the other aspects of the view - font, background etc - you can just return empty QVariant for corresponding roles from your model, the view would figure out these details on its own. If you are using roles as a substitute for columns i.e. to return different pieces of conceptually the same data item, it is probably not the intended use of roles.

For the other part of your question - you can customize the appearance of data displayed in the view through the use of a delegate. For example, you could subclass QStyledItemDelegate, override its displayText method to display ItemA.foo - ItemA.bar instead of just ItemA.foo and then set this delegate into the column of your view corresponding to ItemA.foo via setItemDelegateForColumn. The tricky part here would be to detect changes in both ItemA.foo and ItemA.bar columns which would affect the text displayed in the delegate. A while back I implemented a dedicated class in one of my projects which listens to changes in some column of the original model and "reroutes" the change into another column through signal emitting. I did it to solve this very issue - to catch changes in what delegate should display although technically another model column is affected into which the delegate is not set.