Mixing some GUI elements into your Ruby program
In Ruby, when you’ve got to grab some user input, a quick way of doing it is with a gets:
puts "What is your name?"
name = gets
puts "Hi #{name}"
But, we can make the interaction so much more pleasant through QtRuby:
require 'Qt'
Qt::Application.new(ARGV)
ok = Qt::Boolean.new
name = Qt::InputDialog::getText(”My Application”, “Enter your name”,
Qt::LineEdit::Normal, nil, ok)
if(!ok.nil?)
puts “Hi #{name}”
else
raise “The user didn’t put in a name”
end
The above code makes a much nicer dialog box:
Or, consider it when having a user enter a password:
name = Qt::InputDialog::getText("My Application", "Enter your password",
Qt::LineEdit::Password, nil, ok)
Qt::InputDialog is a convenience class for getting a quick user response - there are methods available for getting integers, floats, and items from a combo box. Of course, you can make much more sophisticated dialogs as well, but for getting a quick bit of input this class is very handy.