Question

We’ve been using Qt’s WebKit as a chat history control. similar to skype, it lists the conversation history, highlighting the name of the person, showing his/her text, and allowing for easy select and copy.

For some reasons beyond my control, my app isn’t allowed to use Qt’s WebKit anymore. I am looking for alternatives that’ll ideally use controls in qt’s basic offering (i’m more than willing to extend).

1. display a skype-like chat history with name of person, text and timestamp
2. be able to have odd-even background colors for chat history rows
3. be scrollable
4. easy selection with mouse of text in a freeform fashion
5. dynamically be able to have chat history rows added to it, and scroll to the bottom to display them, in case the user scrolled up

Any suggestions? Do you think I can use the rich edit control for this? does it have a read-only mode?

Answer 1

QTextBrowser + html combination can be used, which allows to achieve pretty advanced level of formatting with html. For example (assuming ui->textBrowser is QTextBrowser):

MainWindow::MainWindow(QWidget *parent)
        : QMainWindow(parent)
        , ui(new Ui::MainWindow)
{
    ui->setupUi(this);
    ui->textBrowser->setHtml(QString());

    on_User1Message_received("Message from user 1");
    on_User2Message_received("Message from user 2");
}

void MainWindow::on_User1Message_received(const QString &msg)
{
    ui->textBrowser->append(QString().sprintf("<font color=\"red\"> %s </font>",msg.toStdString().c_str()));
}

void MainWindow::on_User2Message_received(const QString &msg)
{
    ui->textBrowser->append(QString().sprintf("<font color=\"blue\"> %s </font>",msg.toStdString().c_str()));
}

Prints messages from two users in different colors. Methods on_UserXMessage_received can be ultimately complicated adding user name, time-stamp, and so forth…