KParts

Plugin framework for user interface components

Introduction

This library implements the framework for KDE parts, which are elaborate widgets with a user-interface defined in terms of actions (menu items, toolbar icons).

Usage

If you are using CMake, you need to have

find_package(KF5Parts NO_MODULE)

(or similar) in your CMakeLists.txt file, and you need to link to KF5::Parts.

The main class is KParts::Part. This, or one of its subclasses, is what authors of parts implement, and how users of parts interact with them.

Applications wishing to embed a part need to inherit their main window from KParts::MainWindow and provide a so-called shell GUI, which provides a basic skeleton GUI with part-independent functionality/actions.

Some KParts applications won't be specific to a given part, but expect to be able to embed, for instance, all types of viewers out there. For this the basic functionality of any viewer has been implemented in KParts::ReadOnlyPart, which viewer-like parts should inherit from. The same applies to KParts::ReadWritePart, which is for editor-like parts.

You can add actions to an existing KParts app from "outside", defining the code for those actions in a shared library. This mechanism is obviously called plugins, and implemented by KParts::Plugin.

For a complete, and very simple, example of how to use KParts to display any kind of file (i.e. making a generic viewer), see the documentation for KMimeTypeTrader::createPartInstanceFromQuery().