How to pass variables to slot methods in QT?

Question

I'm making a little chat messenger program, which needs a list of chat channels the user has joined. To represent this list graphically, I have made a list of QPushButtons, which all represent a different channel. These buttons are made with the following method, and that's where my problem kicks in:

void Messenger::addToActivePanels(std::string& channel)
{
    activePanelsContents = this->findChild<QWidget *>(QString("activePanelsContents"));
    pushButton = new QPushButton(activePanelsContents);
    pushButton->setObjectName("pushButton");
    pushButton->setGeometry(QRect(0, 0, 60, 60));
    pushButton->setText("");
    pushButton->setToolTip(QString(channel.c_str()));
    pushButton->setCheckable(true);
    pushButton->setChecked(false);
    connect(pushButton, SIGNAL(clicked()), this, SLOT(switchTab(channel)));
}

(activePanelContents is a QWidget that holds the list.)

The point is that each button should call the switchTab(string& tabname) method when clicked, including the specific channel's name as variable. This implementation doesn't work though, and I haven't been able to find out how to properly do this.

Answer 1

For strings and integers, you can use QSignalMapper. In your Messenger class, you would add a QSignalMapper mapper object, and your function would look like:

void Messenger::addToActivePanels(std::string& channel)
{
    activePanelsContents = this->findChild<QWidget *>(QString("activePanelsContents"));
    pushButton = new QPushButton(activePanelsContents);
    // ...
    connect(pushButton, SIGNAL(clicked()), &mapper, SLOT(map()));
    mapper.setMapping(pushButton, QString(channel.c_str()));
}

and after you have added all channels to your active panels, you call

connect(&mapper, SIGNAL(mapped(const QString &)), this, SLOT(switchTab(const QString &)));