Detailed Description

The QXmlNodeModelIndex class identifies a node in an XML node model subclassed from QAbstractXmlNodeModel.

QXmlNodeModelIndex is an index into an XML node model. It contains:

• A pointer to an XML node model, which is returned by model(), and
• Some data, which is returned by data(), internalPointer(), and additionalData().

Because QXmlNodeModelIndex is intentionally a simple class, it doesn't have member functions for accessing the properties of nodes. For example, it doesn't have functions for getting a node's name or its list of attributes or child nodes. If you find that you need to retrieve this kind of information from your query results, there are two ways to proceed.

• Send the output of your XQuery to an XML receiver, or
• Let your XQuery do all the work to produce the desired result.

The second case is explained by example. Suppose you want to populate a list widget with the values of certain attributes from a set of result elements. You could write an XQuery to return the set of elements, and then you would write the code to iterate over the result elements, get their attributes, and extract the desired string values. But the simpler way is to just augment your XQuery to finding the desired attribute values. Then all you have to do is evaluate the XQuery using the version of QXmlQuery::evaluateTo() that populates a QStringList, which you can send directly to your widget.

QXmlNodeModelIndex doesn't impose any restrictions on the data value an QXmlNodeModelIndex should contain. The meaning of the data left to the associated node model. Because QXmlNodeModelIndex depends on a particular subclass of QAbstractXmlNodeModel for its existence, the only way you can create an instance of QXmlNodeModelIndex is by asking the node model to create one for you with QAbstractXmlNodeModel::createIndex(). Since that function is protected, it is usually a good idea to write a public function that creates a QXmlNodeModelIndex from arguments that are appropriate for your particular node model.

A default constructed node index is said to be null, i.e., isNull() returns true.

QXmlNodeModelIndex and QAbstractXmlNodeModel follow the same design pattern used for QModelIndex and QAbstractItemModel.