Question

I have a Qt program with many buttons, user-interactable widgets, etc.
At one stage in the program, I would like all the widgets to temporarily ‘stop working’; stop behaving to mouse clicks and instead pass the event on to one function.

(This is so the User can select a widget to perform meta operations. Part explanation here: Get variable name of Qt Widget (for use in Stylesheet)? )

The User would pick a widget (to do stuff with) by clicking it, and of course clicking a button must not cause the button’s bound function to run.

What is the correct (most abstracted, sensible) method of doing this?
(which doesn’t involve too much new code. ie; not subclassing every widget)
Is there anything in Qt designed for this?

So far, I am able to retrieve a list of all the widgets in the program (by calling

QObject.findChildren(QtGui.QWidget)

so the solution can incorporate this.

My current horrible ideas are;

• Some how dealing with all the applications events all the time in one
  function and not letting through the events when I need the
  application to be dormant.
• When I need dormancy, make a new transparent widget which recieves
  mouse clicks and stretch it over the entire window. Take coordinates
  of click and figure out the widget underneath.
• Somehow create a new ‘shell’ instance of the window.

THANKS!
(Sorry for the terrible write-up; in a slight rush)

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python 2.7.2
PyQt4
Windows 7

Answer 1

You can intercept events send to specific widgets with QObject::installEventFilter.