Why Qt is misusing model/view terminology?

Question

I think that the terminology used in Qt with model/view controls is flawed. On their explanation page they state, that they simplified the MVC to MV by merging View and Controller and they are giving the following picture:

However I think, they misnamed the roles of objects and I think that,

1. What they call View with merged Controller is in fact a View only.
2. What they call Model is in fact Controller only.
3. If you really want to have a model it would be somewhere where their "Data" is.

I am speaking about usual and sane way you would use Qt model/view component in your app. Here are the reasons:

1. This is typically Qt component which is used as is, without adding any Controller logic specific to your objects)
2. This is hardly a Model, just because you should implement several Qt methods like rowCount, columnCount, data etc. which have nothing to do with your model. In fact there are typical model methods found in Controllers. Of course, you can implement both Controller and Model logic here, but first it would be quite bad code design and secondly you would merge Controller and Model not Controller and View as they state.
3. As said in reason 2. if you want to separate Model logic that it is surely not the blue box on the picture, but rather the dashed "Data" box (communicating to real Data of course).

Is Qt wrong in their terminology, or it is just me who does not understand? (BTW: The reason why it is not academic question is that I have started to code my project following their naming and I have soon found out, that the code clearly is not right. It was only after that when I realized, that I should not try put Model logic in what they call Model)

Answer 1

Short answer

Qt's MVC only applies to one data structure. When talking about an MVC application you should not think about QAbstractItemModel or QListView.

If you want an MVC architecture for your whole program, Qt hasn't such a "huge" model/view framework. But for each list / tree of data in your program you can use the Qt MVC approach which indeed has a controller within its view. The data is within or outside of the model; this depends on what type of model you are using (own model subclass: probably within the model; e.g. QSqlTableModel: outside (but maybe cached within) the model). To put your models and views together, use own classes which then implement the business logic.

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Long answer

Qt's model/view approach and terminology:

Qt provides simple views for their models. They have a controller built in: selecting, editing and moving items are something what in most cases a controller "controls". That is, interpreting user input (mouse clicks and moves) and giving the appropriate commands to the model.

Qt's models are indeed models having underlying data. The abstract models of course don't hold data, since Qt doesn't know how you want to store them. But you extend a QAbstractItemModel to your needs by adding your data containers to the subclass and making the model interface accessing your data. So in fact, and I assume you don't like this, the problem is that you need to program the model, so how data is accessed and modified in your data structure.

In MVC terminology, the model contains both the data and the logic. In Qt, it's up to you whether or not you include some of your business logic inside your model or put it outside, being a "view" on its own. It's not even clear what's meant by logic: Selecting, renaming and moving items around? => already implemented. Doing calculations with them? => Put it outside or inside the model subclass. Storing or loading data from/to a file? => Put it inside the model subclass.

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My personal opinion:

It is very difficult to provide a good and generic MV(C) system to a programmer. Because in most cases the models are simple (e.g. only string lists) Qt also provides a ready-to-use QStringListModel. But if your data is more complex than strings, it's up to you how you want to represent the data via the Qt model/view interface. If you have, for example, a struct with 3 fields (let's say persons with name, age and gender) you could assign the 3 fields to 3 different columns or to 3 different roles. I dislike both approaches.

I think Qt's model/view framework is only useful when you want to display simple data structures. It becomes difficult to handle if the data is of custom types or structured not in a tree or list (e.g. a graph). In most cases, lists are enough and even in some cases, a model should only hold one single entry. Especially if you want to model one single entry having different attributes (one instance of one class), Qt's model/view framework isn't the right way to separate logic from user interface.

To sum things up, I think Qt's model/view framework is useful if and only if your data is being viewed by one of Qt's viewer widgets. It's totally useless if you're about to write your own viewer for a model holding only one entry, e.g. your application's settings, or if your data isn't of printable types.

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How did I use Qt model/view within a (bigger) application?

I once wrote (in a team) an application which uses multiple Qt models to manage data. We decided to create a DataRole to hold the actual data which was of a different custom type for each different model subclass. We created an outer model class called Model holding all the different Qt models. We also created an outer view class called View holding the windows (widgets) which are connected to the models within Model. So this approach is an extended Qt MVC, adapted to our own needs. Both Model and View classes themselves don't have anything to do with the Qt MVC.

Where did we put the logic? We created classes which did the actual computations on the data by reading data from source models (when they changed) and writing the results into target models. From Qt's point of view, this logic classes would be views, since they "connect" to models (not "view" for the user, but a "view" for the business logic part of the application).

Where are the controllers? In the original MVC terminology, controllers interpret the user input (mouse and keyboard) and give commands to the model to perform the requested action. Since the Qt views already interpret user input like renaming and moving items, this wasn't needed. But what we needed was an interpretation of user interaction which goes beyond the Qt views.