Parameter node wrapper GUI connectors are missing for many widgets

[lassoan]

Summary

Many Qt widgets cannot be used with the recently added parameter node wrapper infrastructure.

Steps to reproduce

Try using the "not supported" widgets in a module GUI and link to parameter node.

Supported:

• qt.QCheckBox
• qt.QPushButton
• qt.QSlider
• qt.QSpinBox
• qt.QDoubleSpinBox
• ctk.ctkSliderWidget
• slicer.qMRMLSliderWidget
• qt.QComboBox
• qt.QLineEdit
• qt.QTextEdit
• ctk.ctkRangeWidget
• ctk.ctkPathLineEdit
• ctk.ctkDirectoryButton
• slicer.qMRMLNodeComboBox

Not supported:

• qMRMLCheckableNodeComboBox
• qMRMLColorPickerWidget
• qMRMLCoordinatesWidget
• qMRMLLinearTransformSlider
• qMRMLListWidget
• qMRMLMatrixWidget
• qMRMLRangeWidget
• qMRMLSegmentSelectorWidget
• qMRMLSpinBox
• qMRMLTransformSliders
• ctkCheckableComboBox
• ctkCheckBox
• ctkColorPickerButton
• ctkComboBox
• ctkCoordinatesWidget
• ctkCoordinatesWidget
• ctkDoubleRangeSlider
• ctkDoubleSlider
• ctkDoubleSpinBox
• ctkFittedTextBrowser
• ctkMatrixWidget
• ctkRangeSlider
• ctkTreeComboBox

Expected behavior

All widgets that are available in Qt Designer should be usable with the parameter node wrapper's GUI connector.

Environment

• Slicer version: Slicer-5.5.0-2023-10-26
• Operating system: all

[HarryDC]

I think we can turn this into a tracking issue for the unsupported widgets but there is a difference in the amount of effort it will take to implement some of these. For the following we already support the underlying data types which means we only need to implement one side of the mapping (from the widget to the datatype)

Implemented/In Progress

• qMRMLRangeWidget
• qMRMLSpinBox
• ctkCheckBox
• ctkComboBox
• ctkDoubleRangeSlider
• ctkDoubleSlider
• ctkDoubleSpinBox
• QLabel

Need Triage

• qMRMLCheckableNodeComboBox
• ctkCheckableComboBox
• ctkFittedTextBrowser

Need more work

these will also need support for the datastructures that they map to

• ctkRangeSlider
  Needs implementation of IntRange to mirror FloatRange
• qMRMLColorPickerWidget
• qMRMLCoordinatesWidget
• qMRMLLinearTransformSlider
• qMRMLMatrixWidget
• qMRMLSegmentSelectorWidget
• qMRMLTransformSliders
• ctkColorPickerButton
• ctkCoordinatesWidget
• ctkMatrixWidget
• ctkTreeComboBox

Needs discussion

• qMRMLListWidget

[lassoan]

@HarryDC thanks a lot for looking into this. Do you think you will have time to work on some of these?

[HarryDC]

@lassoan Yes I'll start with the "easy" list and we'll work our way down from there but i think PRs are probably going to come in pieces

[HarryDC]

Hit some issues when adding the ctkDoubleRangeSlider commontk/CTK#1157

Additionally found an issue when using the FloatRange annotation, when there is a RangeBounds markup and the bounds do not include 0, a default value has to be provided otherwise the connection fails as the default of FloatRange is 0,0. Right now i'm requiring a default value for the Ranges .

I want to add the CtkRangeSlider and then i'll put up a first PR

[jcfr]

re: ctkDoubleRangeSlider

The following pull request should expose the relevant method to Python:

• ENH: Convert ctkDoubleRangeSlider::setRange to a slot to expose to Python commontk/CTK#1158

Can you test locally and see if anything else is needed ?

[HarryDC]

I can check this but i worked around it using the maximum and minimum property it made sense after the explanation

[jcfr]

Using the setRange will ensure the range changed signal is emitted only once.

[HarryDC]

Note after discussion with @sjh26 we figured out that qMRMLListWidget is currently not used in the slicer core, would need more work wrt what the expected result of a selection is for this widget, might need more work in slicer to expose signals on selection.