Question

Not sure if this has a straightforward solution, but I want to write a function that shows a dialog (defined elsewhere in a class that inherits QDialog) and returns the user input when the user has finished interacting with the dialog. In other words, something similar to the QFileDialog::getOpenFileName static method, where a single line can open the dialog and return the user’s input, instead of employing the cumbersome (in this case) signal/slot mechanism.

Intended use:

/* Shows the dialog, waits until user presses OK or Cancel,
   then returns the user's choice. 
*/

result = createDialogAndReturnUserChoice() 

I am currently working in PyQt but I’m fine with answers in the traditional Qt4 C++ framework.

EDIT//

Here’s how to do it:

dialog = CustomDialog() # creates the custom dialog we have defined in a class inheriting QDialog
if dialog.exec_(): # on exec_(), the whole program freezes until the user is done with the dialog; it returns the response of the user
   # success
else:
   # failure

Answer 1

It sounds like you have everything in place that you need. You can make a static function in your QDialog derived class that does what you want. You can create a struct or class that encapsulates the data the user will generate and return it from your static function. Qt includes all the source code so you can look at QFileDialog::getOpenFileName() in qfiledialog.cpp and see what they do.

Edit: Sorry, I missed that you are working in Python. I don’t know what facilities the language has for extending a C++ class and static methods.