How to assign a signal to a QMenu instead of QAction in Qt?

Question

I would like to have a menu item without children. I have a QMenubar, and in this menubar there is a QMenu. To use it as a menu, I have to put QActions in it, and they will appear if I click on the QMenu. How is it possible, to have only the menu, without any QActions, to do an action just as if it were a QAction?

A workaround would be to have a toolbox and disguise it as a menu, but it raises several problems:

It's not the cleanest solution
I have to manually care about highlighting it on mouse hover, and it will not be platform- and user setting independent.
I can't use it together in a menubar with normal menus with children.

Having a menu without QActions seems meaningless to me. However, if you want to trigger only one slot for several QActions, you can use QActionGroup: doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6/qactiongroup.html — Donotalo
What I really want can be described as having only one QAction, but it should not be in a dropdown menulist, but it should be the top-level item in the menu. If I add a single QAction, there will be a menu list with a single item when I click on the menu. — vsz

king_nak king_nak · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-16T11:15:21

So you want a menu bar that triggers actions without opening sub-menus?

Try to directly add QActions to the menubar, instead of having a QMenu inbetween:

#include <QtWidgets>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    QApplication app(argc, argv);
    QMainWindow *wnd = new QMainWindow;
    QMenuBar *m = new QMenuBar;
    QAction *a = new QAction("DoIt");

    QObject::connect(a, &QAction::triggered, [wnd](){
        QMessageBox::information(wnd, "DoIt", "DoIt");
    });

    m->addAction(a);
    wnd->setMenuBar(m);
    wnd->show();
    return app.exec();
}

Alternatively, you could subclass the QMenu and handle the mousePressEvent method to emit a signal

How to assign a signal to a QMenu instead of QAction in Qt?

1 Answers