Coding Guidelines and API Conventions

Overview | Design | Coding Guidelines | Porting to KDE Frameworks 5

All KTextEditor interfaces have a consistent design.

• naming follows Qt style. Avoid Java style getters like getSomeData() for example,
• core interfaces (see Overview of the Core Interface Design) which inherit QObject declare all signals as real signals,
• all other interfaces, which do not subclass QObject, must declare their signals as virtual private member functions. An implementation must reimplement this virtual member function as a real signal.
• all signals have the sender object as first parameter, for example all document signals have to look like this:

  void signalFromDocument (KTextEditor::Document *doc, ...);

  This allows easy and consistent query which object did send the signal, which is important for most applications, as they listen to multiple documents/views/editors/...
• all interface functions should be virtual, to allow subclasses to overwrite them, most members should even be pure virtual, beside additional convenience/helper functions.

The interface KTextEditor::Cursor represents a cursor position, i.e. a line/column tuple. The same holds for KTextEditor::Range. As both of this concepts are much cleaner than tuples, please keep the following guidelines:

• never use line/column tuples in parameter lists, use KTextEditor::Cursor instead,
• never use Cursor/Cursor tuples for ranges, use KTextEditor::Range instead of two Cursors.

Author

Christoph Cullmann <cullm.nosp@m.ann@.nosp@m.kde.o.nosp@m.rg>

Dominik Haumann <dhaum.nosp@m.ann@.nosp@m.kde.o.nosp@m.rg>