GUI – Edit Menu - Actions

The edit box already has a context (right-click) menu with Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete and Select All.  Applications customarily also have these same actions on the Edit menu and on the tool bar.  These actions were created in Designer after adding the Edit menu and adding each of these edit actions.  Once the actions were created, each was edited to add an icon, shortcut key and status tip.

The slot functions for each action was implemented in the MainWindow class with the names on_actionName_triggered so that these would automatically be connected to the actions.  The implementation of most of these functions was a single line that calls the appropriate member function of the EditBox instance (undo, redo, cut, copy, and paste).  The delete and select all actions required slightly different handling.

For delete, there is no function to delete the currently selected text in the QTextEdit class that EditBox is derived from.  The QTextCursor member of QTextEdit, which controls the cursor and selection of QTextEdit, must be used.  The textCursor() access function is used to obtain the text cursor of EditBox.  For deleting the current selected, the removeSelectText() function of QTextCursor is called:

m_editBox->textCursor().removeSelectedText();

The select all action required a little more handling.  The QTextCursor has a way of selecting text by using the select() function with an argument to specify what to select, with QTextCursor::Document being the option for selecting all of the text.  However, the select() function can't be called directly using the textCursor() access function like with delete because the selection doesn't get back to the document inside the edit box.  Instead, the text cursor needs to be obtained, the selection made and the text cursor put back with the setTextCursor() access function:

QTextCursor textCursor = m_editBox->textCursor();
textCursor.select(QTextCursor::Document);
m_editBox->setTextCursor(textCursor);

Additional functionality is required to enable and disable these actions when appropriate.  For example, cut and copy should only be enabled if text is currently selected.  The context menu already works like this.  This functionality will be the subject of the next commit.

[commit d8c2933481]