Search code examples
pythonqt4pyqt4pysideqwebpage

Getting erratic "Invalid Signal signature" errors in PySide QWebPage


I am creating an application which automates loading webpages and creating screenshots (no, I cannot use one of the existing solutions) using PySide. One part of the app gets a list of URLs and loads each URL in turn using a new QWebPage object. After the page is loaded a screenshot is taken and the QWebPage object is deleted.

Every now and then, given enough runs, I get the following error from PySide, as a RuntimeError exception:

Invalid Signal signature: loadStarted()
Failed to connect signal loadStarted().

The first line is printed to STDERR (probably by Qt?) and the second line is the Python exception.

loadStarted() is a built-in QWebPage signal, not something I created. This works 90% of the time, and I could not figure out what makes it fail occasionally.

To be honest, this app is quite unusual in design, as it hooks PySide/Qt into a uWSGI served web app - this means that for example I am not using the QApplication event loop but rather a local event loop for each page load. I am also not experienced in either Qt or Python so it's possible I'm making a lot of mistakes, but I can't figure out what those are.

I am thinking this post might have something to do with it, but I'm not sure.

Any suggestions on where to look next?

UPDATE: the signal is connected through the following code:

class MyWebPage(QWebPage):

    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(MyWebPage, self).__init__(parent)
        self.loadStarted.connect(self.started)
        self.loadFinished[bool].connect(self.finished)

MyWebPage objects are created as children of a different single QObject instance which is not deleted until the process shuts down. They are deleted by calling page.deleteLater() once I am done with them. Since I am running a local event loop, I trigger deferred deletions to happen after exiting local event loop by calling:

 # self.eventLoop is the local event loop, which at this stage is not running
 self.eventLoop.processEvents()

 # self.app is the QApplication instance
 self.app.sendPostedEvents(None, QEvent.DeferredDelete)

Solution

  • For what its worth, this and other issues were finally solved in a decent way after I upgraded to PySide 1.2.1.