PySide Tree Tutorial IV: What next?

Part of a series on treebuilding in PySide: see Table of Contents.

We have finished going over simpletreemodel. This and the final post are effectively appendices to our discussion of that example.

You have probably noticed that model/view programming is a complex subject, probably deserving book-length treatment. Tree views are the most complex built-in views there are, and hopefully we have made some headway on how to build them.

We have left out how we would handle an editable tree model (this is covered in the editabletreemodel example that comes with PySide). Nor have we addressed how to exert more precise control over how items are displayed, such as how to show html-formatted strings: this is the purview of custom delegates (a topic covered in the spinboxdelegate and stardelegate examples). We have also left open what to do if we want graphical rather than textual rendering of our data: this would involve the construction of a custom view (one example is to be found in chart).

For those that want a more principled overview of model/view programming in Python, Summerfield (2008) has three chapters on the topic. The brave can also try Summerfield (2010), for an extremely thorough treatment, and an entire chapter on trees. While the latter is not written for Python, it has tons of useful information about model-view programming if you can brave the translation from c++.

Summerfield, M (2010) Advanced Qt Programming. Prentice Hall.
Summerfield, M (2008) Rapid Gui Programming with Python and Qt. Prentice Hall.