Using .ui files from Designer or QtCreator with QUiLoader and pyside2-uic — Qt for Python (original) (raw)

This page describes the use of Qt Creator to create graphical interfaces for your Qt for Python project. You will need Qt Creator to design and modify your interface (UI file).

If you don’t know how to use Qt Creator, refer to theUsing Qt Designerdocumentation page.

At Qt Creator, create a new Qt Design Form, choose “Main Window” for template. And save as mainwindow.ui. Add a QPushButton to the center of the centralwidget.

Your file mainwindow.ui should look something like this:

Now we are ready to decide how to use the UI file from Python.

Option A: Generating a Python class¶

Another option to interact with a UI file is to generate a Python class from it. This is possible thanks to the pyside2-uic tool. To use this tool, you need to run the following command on a console:

pyside2-uic mainwindow.ui > ui_mainwindow.py

We redirect all the output of the command to a file called ui_mainwindow.py, which will be imported directly:

from ui_mainwindow import Ui_MainWindow

Now to use it, we should create a personalized class for our widget to setup this generated design.

To understand the idea, let’s take a look at the whole code:

import sys from PySide2.QtWidgets import QApplication, QMainWindow from PySide2.QtCore import QFile from ui_mainwindow import Ui_MainWindow

class MainWindow(QMainWindow): def init(self): super(MainWindow, self).init() self.ui = Ui_MainWindow() self.ui.setupUi(self)

if name == "main": app = QApplication(sys.argv)

window = MainWindow()
window.show()

sys.exit(app.exec_())

What is inside the if statement is already known from the previous examples, and our new basic class contains only two new lines that are in charge of loading the generated python class from the UI file:

self.ui = Ui_MainWindow() self.ui.setupUi(self)

Note

You must run pyside2-uic again every time you make changes to the UI file.

Option B: Loading it directly¶

To load the UI file directly, we will need a class from the QtUiToolsmodule:

from PySide2.QtUiTools import QUiLoader

The QUiLoader lets us load the ui file dynamically and use it right away:

ui_file = QFile("mainwindow.ui") ui_file.open(QFile.ReadOnly)

loader = QUiLoader() window = loader.load(ui_file) window.show()

The complete code of this example looks like this:

File: main.py

import sys from PySide2.QtUiTools import QUiLoader from PySide2.QtWidgets import QApplication from PySide2.QtCore import QFile, QIODevice

if name == "main": app = QApplication(sys.argv)

ui_file_name = "mainwindow.ui"
ui_file = QFile(ui_file_name)
if not ui_file.open(QIODevice.ReadOnly):
    print("Cannot open {}: {}".format(ui_file_name, ui_file.errorString()))
    sys.exit(-1)
loader = QUiLoader()
window = loader.load(ui_file)
ui_file.close()
if not window:
    print(loader.errorString())
    sys.exit(-1)
window.show()

sys.exit(app.exec_())

Then to execute it we just need to run the following on a command prompt:

Note

QUiLoader uses connect() calls taking the function signatures as string arguments for signal/slot connections. It is thus unable to handle Python types like str or list from custom widgets written in Python since these types are internally mapped to different C++ types.

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