[FIXED] How create a visual aid for TableWidget

Issue

I have a tablewidget with 1000-ish rows of data. And there's this nice feature auto-implemented for table that searches for the matched data whenever we press letter keys. I want to make it a little bit more intuitive with a visual aid.

I want to create a label that would display letters that the user has entered in the last 2 seconds. It should continue concatenating and displaying new letters. If the user stops entering new letters for more than 2 seconds then the label should disappear.

I think I need to create a sort of a "manager" function that would receive keypresses and create this label and terminates it when 2 seconds have passed. Problem is I don't know how to make this function "waits" for new keystrokes.

I suppose this visual aid is not something new and somebody probably implemented it before but I don't know what it's called to Google so I'm sorry for creating a post for it.

Solution

You can reimplement the keyboardSearch() function of the tablewidget in a subclass, and then create a child widget that will update itself based on the search.

Note that the search is automatically reset based on the QApplication.keyboardInputInterval, which makes appear the search widget for a very short time (until the view can accept a new search as part of the current one).

from PyQt5 import QtCore, QtWidgets
from random import choice
from string import ascii_lowercase

class TableSearch(QtWidgets.QTableWidget):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__(0, 3)
        self.setEditTriggers(self.NoEditTriggers)
        for row in range(500):
            self.insertRow(row)
            for col in range(3):
                text = ''.join(choice(ascii_lowercase) for i in range(5))
                self.setItem(row, col, QtWidgets.QTableWidgetItem(text))

        self.searchWidget = QtWidgets.QLabel(self)
        self.searchWidget.setStyleSheet('''
            QLabel {
                border: 1px inset darkGray; 
                border-radius: 2px;
                background: palette(window);
            }
            ''')
        self.searchWidget.hide()
        self.searchTimer = QtCore.QTimer(
            singleShot=True, 
            timeout=self.resetSearch, 
            interval=QtWidgets.QApplication.instance().keyboardInputInterval())

    def resetSearch(self):
        self.searchWidget.setText('')
        self.searchWidget.hide()

    def updateSearchWidget(self):
        if not self.searchWidget.text():
            self.searchWidget.hide()
            return
        self.searchWidget.show()
        self.searchWidget.adjustSize()
        geo = self.searchWidget.geometry()
        geo.moveBottomRight(
            self.viewport().geometry().bottomRight() - QtCore.QPoint(2, 2))
        self.searchWidget.setGeometry(geo)

    def keyboardSearch(self, search):
        super().keyboardSearch(search)
        if not search:
            self.searchWidget.setText('')
        else:
            text = self.searchWidget.text()
            if not text:
                text = 'Searching: '
            text += search
            self.searchWidget.setText(text)
        self.updateSearchWidget()
        self.searchTimer.start()

    def resizeEvent(self, event):
        super().resizeEvent(event)
        self.updateSearchWidget()

Answered By - musicamante