fast QListView numerical sort

[Andy Salnikov]

"Uwe Mayer" <merkosh at hadiko.de> wrote in message
news:c0fn8h$pfp$1 at news.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de...
> Hi,
>
> Using PyQt I got a QListView with about 800 entries now (but its intended
to
> be scalable up to about 3000).
> The first column contains numerical data. Now Qt does the sorting all by
its
> self and quite fast enough. By default it sorts alphanumerically, i.e. 1
10
> 100 101 110 111 2 ...
>
> Solutions on the web suggested left padding the digits with white spaces
> which didn't work for me.

  Hmm, I'd expect it to work.

> Left padding with 0's does not look good.
> Qt Manual says you can overwrite the compare method
QListViewItem.compare -
> which I did:
>
> QListViewItem.compare = lambda s,a,b,c: s.text(0).toInt()[0]
> -a.text(0).toInt()[0]
>
> The compare method returns < 0 for "smaller", 0 for "equal", > 0 for
> "bigger".
> Doing so works, but causes a 2 sec delay each time a re-sort has to be
done
> - which is rather annoying (at only less than 1/3 of its expected load!)
>
  Well, this probably comes from PyQt's nature - its a layer between Qt
(which is C++)
and Python. QListView calls some C++ function to sort its items, which in
turn makes
a lot of calls to QListViewItem::compare(). Every call to compare() has to
be
translated from C++ world to Python world, and the result returned back.

> Solutions I could come up with are:
> a. derive a C++ QListViewItem that does the numerical sorting and use this
> instead of the default QListViewItem in the hope it'll be faster
> pro: probably the easyest (faster? fast enough?)
> con: not portable
>
  That should be fast enough, I guess, this is the ultimate speed you can
get.
Why isn't it portable?

> b. implement all sorting and inserting related functions by myself in
Python
> and do the sorting from Python
> pro: portable
> con: much more coding to be done; probably contains more bugs
>
  I'm not at all sure that it will be faster than what you currently have.
It sure might be
because you'd remove most of that translation layer calls.

> Which do you favour or do you have other suggestions?
>
  I'd say check that space-filled approach. It should work one way or
another.

  Cheers,
  Andy.