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Qt: Tab Icon when QDockWidget becomes docked

Qt's QMainWindow has a ability to dock windows derived from QDockWidget. It also would put one on top on the other if few of them are stacked, producing a tab bar. Whenever a QDockWidget's state changes a signal topLevelChanged() is emmitted. At this point I would like to get access to underlying QTabWidget to set an icon for a a newly added tab. How can I do it? My patience is over trying to dig the answer out from Qt's documentation and source code. Thank you in advance.

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So icon I want to be on Contents/Index tabs.

Solution

  • Once at least one dockwidget has been tabified, the main-window will create a QTabBar to provide the dock-tabs. Each dock-area can have its own tab-bar. These tab-bars will become children of the main-window, so you can use findChildren() or children() to get references to them.

    The main difficulty will be in finding which dock-widget belongs to which tab and in which tab-bar. If the dock-widget window-titles are all unique, you can just search using the tabText(). Otherwise, you might be able to use the tabData(), which Qt sets internally to a quintptr from the dock-widget.

    Once you have the correct tab, you can of course use setTabIcon() to add your icon. But note that every time a dock-widget is untabified or moved to another tab-bar, the icon will be lost.