I'm writing a wizard UI based on the QWizard Qt object. There's one particular situation where I want the user to log in to a service using host, username, and password. The rest of the wizard then manipulates this service to do various setup tasks. The login may take a while, especially in error cases where the DNS name takes a long time to resolve -- or perhaps it may not even resolve at all.
So my idea is to make all three fields mandatory using the registerField mechanism, and when the user hits Next, we show a little throbber on the wizard page saying "Connecting to server, please wait..." while we try to connect in the background. If the connection succeeds, we advance to the next page. If not, we highlight the offending field and ask the user to try again.
However, I'm at a loss for how to accomplish this. The options I've thought of:
1) Override validatePage and have it start a thread in the background. Enter a wait inside validatePage() that pumps the Qt event loop until the thread finishes. You'd think this was the ugliest solution, but...
2) Hide the real Next button and add a custom Next button that, when clicked, dispatches my long running function in a thread and waits for a 'validation complete' signal to be raised by something. When that happens, we manually call QWizard::next() (and we completely bypass the real validation logic from validatePage and friends.) This is even uglier, but moves the ugliness to a different level that may make development easier.
Surely there's a better way?
My final choice was #2 (override the Next button, simulate its behavior, but capture its click events manually and do the things I want to with it.) Writing the glue to define the Next button's behavior was minimal, and I was able to subclass QWizardPage with a number of hooks that let me run my task ON the same page, instead of having to switch to an interstitial page and worry about whether to go forwards or backwards. Thanks Caleb for your answer though.