QTemporaryFile Class

Detailed Description

QTemporaryFile is used to create unique temporary files safely. The file itself is created by calling open(). The name of the temporary file is guaranteed to be unique (i.e., you are guaranteed to not overwrite an existing file), and the file will subsequently be removed upon destruction of the QTemporaryFile object. This is an important technique that avoids data corruption for applications that store data in temporary files. The file name is either auto-generated, or created based on a template, which is passed to QTemporaryFile's constructor.

Example:

     // Within a function/method...

     QTemporaryFile file;
     if (file.open()) {
         // file.fileName() returns the unique file name
     }

     // The QTemporaryFile destructor removes the temporary file
     // as it goes out of scope.

Reopening a QTemporaryFile after calling close() is safe. For as long as the QTemporaryFile object itself is not destroyed, the unique temporary file will exist and be kept open internally by QTemporaryFile.

The file name of the temporary file can be found by calling fileName(). Note that this is only defined after the file is first opened; the function returns an empty string before this.

A temporary file will have some static part of the name and some part that is calculated to be unique. The default filename will be determined from QCoreApplication::applicationName() (otherwise qt_temp) and will be placed into the temporary path as returned by QDir::tempPath(). If you specify your own filename, a relative file path will not be placed in the temporary directory by default, but be relative to the current working directory. It is important to specify the correct directory if the rename() function will be called, as QTemporaryFile can only rename files within the same volume / filesystem as the temporary file itself was created on.

Specified filenames can contain the following template XXXXXX (six upper case "X" characters), which will be replaced by the auto-generated portion of the filename. Note that the template is case sensitive. If the template is not present in the filename, QTemporaryFile appends the generated part to the filename given.