PyQt/PySide QMainWindow - switching between views

Question

Hello PyQt/PySide experts,

I am a newbie to both PyQt/PySide and desktop application development (I'm a web developer).

I have a question about how you should navigate among different views in a PyQt/PySide application.

Suppose my app has views (i.e. like pages in a web app) "TEST1"(default) and "TEST2", and I want to switch between them by clicking on the corresponding toolbar item.

I thought I could use QMainWindow.setCentralWidget() to set the requested view each time the toolbar button is clicked, but is this a normal way to navigate among different views in PyQt/PySide?

For your reference, I will post an example code to illustrate the above:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
from PySide import QtCore
from PySide.QtCore import *
from PySide.QtGui import *

class MainWindow(QMainWindow):

    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(MainWindow, self).__init__(parent)

        # toolbar action 1
        self.test1_action = QAction(QIcon('icons/test1.png'), 'Test 1', self)
        self.test1_action.triggered.connect(self.show_test1_view)

        # toolbar action 2
        self.test2_action = QAction(QIcon('icons/test2.png'), 'Test 2', self)
        self.test2_action.triggered.connect(self.show_test2_view)

        # create toolbar
        self.toolbar = self.addToolBar('Actions')
        self.toolbar.addAction(self.test1_action)
        self.toolbar.addAction(self.test2_action)

        # default view is test1, so call the method to set the central widget to "test1" view.
        self.show_test1_view()

    # switch to "test1" view - just a simple label here.
    def show_test1_view(self):
        self.test1_view = QLabel('TEST1 VIEW')
        self.setCentralWidget(self.test1_view)

    # switch to "test2" view - just a simple label here.
    def show_test2_view(self):
        self.test2_view = QLabel('TEST2 VIEW')
        self.setCentralWidget(self.test2_view)

app = QApplication(sys.argv)

window = MainWindow()
window.show()

app.exec_()
sys.exit()

Thank you in advance...!

Answer 1

stackedwidget might do the trick