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Creating KParts components, Part 1: Build KParts components

David Faure (faure@kde.org), Maintainer of Konqueror, MandrakeSoft

David Faure is a French KDE Developer working for MandrakeSoft and the maintainer of Konqueror, the file manager and Web browser. He also works on the KDE libraries (component technology and network transparency) and on KOffice (framework and KWord). His experience with KParts stems directly from his involvement in the design and development of KParts, particularly before the KDE 2.0 release. You can contact him at faure@kde.org.

Summary: This tutorial shows you how to build and deploy a KParts component, how to provide extra functionality through the component's actions, and how to improve integration into Konqueror with the Browser Extension.

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Date: 21 May 2002
Level: Introductory
PDF: A4 and Letter (92 KB | 19 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

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About this tutorial

This tutorial shows you how to create KParts components. It introduces the core KParts concepts of read-only and read-write parts and network transparency.

KParts is the component technology that has been introduced in KDE 2. KParts allows KDE applications that need the same functionality to share a component for this task, "embedding" the graphical component into the application's window. KParts components are mainly viewers and editors.

This tutorial presents the classes provided by the KParts framework: ReadOnlyPart for viewers, and ReadWritePart for editors. The tutorial then demonstrates how to create a basic component. The example component can view XML files as a tree of tags. This example uses the QListView widget (included in the Qt library).

The tutorial then shows how to deploy the component so that Konqueror can use it, and later the tutorial shows how to add actions to the component, including the XML-GUI file to position those actions in the GUI. Lastly, it demonstrates how to transform a read-only part into a read-write part.

The second KParts tutorial, "Creating KParts components, Part 2: Use KParts components in a KDE application," shows how to write KDE applications that are able to utilize KParts components, either those provided by KDE or custom ones.

Prerequisites

Readers should be familiar with C++ application development: classes, methods, members, etc. It's also helpful to have a basic knowledge about Qt, such as signals and slots. Previous experience with KDE development will help in understanding the tutorial, although it isn't required.

To gain an understanding of the KParts component architecture, read the article "Coding with KParts," also by David Faure.

To run the code in this tutorial, you need the following tools:

KDE 2.x or 3.x and its development packages. KDE 3 is recommended, since it simplifies some of the code needed to use KParts. Download KDE from kde.org.
A C++ compiler (usually gcc) and other standard GNU programming tools (make, autoconf etc.), which all come with any Linux distribution. You can download gcc from GNU.
Developers who prefer an IDE instead of a simple text editor can use KDevelop.
Without KDevelop, it is necessary to use the kdesdk package to generate a compilation framework. You can get kdesdk from kde.org (as well as from many other places Web-wide).

Technical terms

The tutorial uses the words component and part interchangeably, since a KParts component is called a part.
The variable $prefix designates the prefix (in other words, base directory) where KDE is installed. This is /usr on many distributions. The best way to check is to run kde-config --prefix.

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