Drag and Drop in Model/View Programming

Introduction to Qt Widgets (Part 68)

10 October 2025

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To watch this video on our website please or view it directly on YouTube

In the previous episode, we learned how to add drag and drop to a widget. We could now take that knowledge and add drag and drop to list views, tables and tree views, but that would be quite a bit of work.

Fortunately, QAbstractItemView (which is the super class for those three) does already have support for it.

All we need to do is to add information in our model about what is being dragged out, or how to handle data being dropped on it.

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome

00:27 What do we get out of the box?

04:58 The dropside example

06:04 QStandardItemModel's default drag and drop implementation

07:45 Advertise: Modernizing your C++ code

08:14 Implementing drag from my own models

12:20 The drop side of my own models

14:30 Just a note

16:38 The example

Links:

The example code showcased in this video is available here.

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Jesper K. Pedersen

HR Director / COO

Jesper K. Pedersen – COO/HR director at KDAB. Jesper has actively developed with Qt since 1998 and, despite his fancy title, still does so.

He has held almost 100 training classes in Qt since 2000. Today, his greatest claim to fame is the QML youtube series and more recently his youtube series called Qt Widgets and More.

Drag and Drop in Model/View Programming

Introduction to Qt Widgets (Part 68)

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