QCompleter Class

Detailed Description

You can use QCompleter to provide auto completions in any Qt widget, such as QLineEdit and QComboBox. When the user starts typing a word, QCompleter suggests possible ways of completing the word, based on a word list. The word list is provided as a QAbstractItemModel. (For simple applications, where the word list is static, you can pass a QStringList to QCompleter's constructor.)

Basic Usage

A QCompleter is used typically with a QLineEdit or QComboBox. For example, here's how to provide auto completions from a simple word list in a QLineEdit:

 QStringList wordList;
 wordList << "alpha" << "omega" << "omicron" << "zeta";

 QLineEdit *lineEdit = new QLineEdit(this);

 QCompleter *completer = new QCompleter(wordList, this);
 completer->setCaseSensitivity(Qt::CaseInsensitive);
 lineEdit->setCompleter(completer);

A QFileSystemModel can be used to provide auto completion of file names. For example:

 QCompleter *completer = new QCompleter(this);
 completer->setModel(new QFileSystemModel(completer));
 lineEdit->setCompleter(completer);

To set the model on which QCompleter should operate, call setModel(). By default, QCompleter will attempt to match the completion prefix (i.e., the word that the user has started typing) against the Qt::EditRole data stored in column 0 in the model case sensitively. This can be changed using setCompletionRole(), setCompletionColumn(), and setCaseSensitivity().

If the model is sorted on the column and role that are used for completion, you can call setModelSorting() with either QCompleter::CaseSensitivelySortedModel or QCompleter::CaseInsensitivelySortedModel as the argument. On large models, this can lead to significant performance improvements, because QCompleter can then use binary search instead of linear search. The binary search only works when the filterMode is Qt::MatchStartsWith.

The model can be a list model, a table model, or a tree model. Completion on tree models is slightly more involved and is covered in the Handling Tree Models section below.

The completionMode() determines the mode used to provide completions to the user.

Iterating Through Completions

To retrieve a single candidate string, call setCompletionPrefix() with the text that needs to be completed and call currentCompletion(). You can iterate through the list of completions as below:

 for (int i = 0; completer->setCurrentRow(i); i++)
     qDebug() << completer->currentCompletion() << " is match number " << i;

completionCount() returns the total number of completions for the current prefix. completionCount() should be avoided when possible, since it requires a scan of the entire model.

The Completion Model

completionModel() return a list model that contains all possible completions for the current completion prefix, in the order in which they appear in the model. This model can be used to display the current completions in a custom view. Calling setCompletionPrefix() automatically refreshes the completion model.

Handling Tree Models

QCompleter can look for completions in tree models, assuming that any item (or sub-item or sub-sub-item) can be unambiguously represented as a string by specifying the path to the item. The completion is then performed one level at a time.

Let's take the example of a user typing in a file system path. The model is a (hierarchical) QFileSystemModel. The completion occurs for every element in the path. For example, if the current text is C:\Wind, QCompleter might suggest Windows to complete the current path element. Similarly, if the current text is C:\Windows\Sy, QCompleter might suggest System.

For this kind of completion to work, QCompleter needs to be able to split the path into a list of strings that are matched at each level. For C:\Windows\Sy, it needs to be split as "C:", "Windows" and "Sy". The default implementation of splitPath(), splits the completionPrefix using QDir::separator() if the model is a QFileSystemModel.

To provide completions, QCompleter needs to know the path from an index. This is provided by pathFromIndex(). The default implementation of pathFromIndex(), returns the data for the edit role for list models and the absolute file path if the mode is a QFileSystemModel.