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Inspecting Qt applications

Next, you can launch any number of Qt applications, using the button. Their names and PIDs (process IDs) will appear in the QApplication list dock window. You can switch between applications by clicking on them in the list.

If you are using a Windows platform, the applications must be prepared. In this case, it is enough just to run them from the command line.

The button invokes the Launch application dialog. The path to the application you wish to inspect is entered here. On Unix platforms, this dialog also contains an input field for the path to the shared libarary libinspector.so.1 used in the LD_PRELOAD mechanism. This is usually located in the package's libinspector subdirectory.

After selecting an application in the QApplication list dock window, you can use the buttons in the toolbar to open one or more views into it. All views except the signal trace share a common selection. Clicking on a QObject in one view causes all other views to select that QObject.

The available views are:

• QObject list view,
• QObject tree view,
• signal/slot graph view,
• signal/slot list view,
• property view,
• signal trace.

All views except the signal trace display the state of the application at the precise moment it is selected in the list. Use the button to update the display at any time.

The QtObjectInspector's main window contains two dock windows. The first dock window is the QApplication list mentioned above. The second dock window is the User class list, which is a list of user defined classes that are descended from QObject, and that are present in the application's object tree. Clicking in the User class list will cause the corresponding QObject to become selected in QtObjectInspector's views.