BroTools Snippets #03 - PySide context menu for QLineEdit and other elements...

*Different small parts of my expanding collection of Maya tools and scripts, from small scripts to large rigging and simulation systems.

Well, some time ago I decided to go with PySide code for all my UIs instead of native maya.cmds functions for menu-building. I was attracted to the freedom in creating and styling of those menus, and the fact that Jeremy Ernst did a lot of menus with PySide. And another fact that knowing PySide I can not only write UIs for maya, but also for different standalone python tools. Which is cool. But if you just need a menu – go with cmds. Don’t bother with PySide. Anyway, with that said, I still prefer to use PySide. And recently I was banging my head against the wall, trying to add a simple context menu to QLineEdit. To allow pasting some preset text into QLineEdit, for BroSelector tool. And Finally, it worked!

Here is the full code related to it. I skip imports and window creation. Just the relevant stuff.

#Creating the actual QLineEdit. I use from QtGui import *, so I don't need to write QtGui.QLineEdit, just QLineEdit, mind that.
self.type = QLineEdit("transform")
# Adding context menu to line edit
# Creating action. Make as many as you like
self.actionHello = QAction(self)
self.actionHello.setText("Hello")
self.actionHello.triggered.connect(yourFunctionHere)

# Creating Menu
self.menu = QMenu(self)
# Adding action to menu. Add as many as you like
self.menu.addAction(self.actionHello)

# First we need to change our element's Context Menu Policy to Custom.
self.type.setContextMenuPolicy(Qt.CustomContextMenu)

# Now we catch basically the right-click event, the customContextMenuRequested event, and assing our own handler (function) for it.
self.type.customContextMenuRequested.connect(self.contextMenuRequested)

#And here goes the handler function.
def contextMenuRequested(self, point):
    # the point variable (which you can call whatever you like actually) is passed to this function as first arg, so we can use it in the next line.
    self.menu.exec_(self.type.mapToGlobal(point))