Notification when QDockWidget's tab is clicked?

Question

I need to execute a block of code when the user clicks on the tab of a tabbified QDockWidget. So far I've been doing this via a hack using the "visibilityChanged" event but this is now causing issues (for example, if I have several tabbified dock widgets and I drag one out so that it is floating, the tabbified one underneath will fire its "visibilityChanged" event which I will mistakenly interpret as the user clicking the tab). How can I receive proper notification when a user clicks on a QDockWidgets' tab? I've experimented with the "focusInEvent" of QDockWidget but it doesn't seem to fire when the tab is clicked.

Answer 1

When you use tabifyDockWidget() method QMainWindow creates a QTabBar, this is not directly accessible but using findChild() you can get it, and then use the tabBarClicked signal

from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui

class MainWindow(QtGui.QMainWindow):
    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(MainWindow, self).__init__(parent)
        first_dock = None

        for i in range(10):
            dock = QtGui.QDockWidget("title {}".format(i), self)
            dock.setWidget(QtGui.QTextEdit()) # testing
            self.addDockWidget(QtCore.Qt.TopDockWidgetArea, dock)
            if first_dock:
                self.tabifyDockWidget(first_dock, dock)
            else:
                first_dock = dock
                dock.raise_()

        tabbar = self.findChild(QtGui.QTabBar, "")
        tabbar.tabBarClicked.connect(self.onTabBarClicked)

    def onTabBarClicked(self, index):
        tabbar = self.sender()
        text = tabbar.tabText(index)
        print("index={}, text={}".format(index, text))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys

    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
    w = MainWindow()
    w.show()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())