How to handle modal dialog in pytest-qt without mocking the dialog

I am using pytest-qt to automate the testing of a PyQt GUI. The dialogs need to be handled as a part of the testing(dialogs should not be mocked).

For example, file dialog that comes after a button-click has to be handled. There are 2 problems

1. After the button click command, the program control goes to the event handler and not to the next line where I can try to send mouseclick/keystrokes to the dialog.

2. Since the QDialog is not added to the main widget, it is not being listed among the children of the main widget. So how to get the reference of the QDialog?

I tried multi-threading but that didn’t work, later I found that QObjects are not thread-safe.

def test_filedialog(qtbot, window):
    qtbot.mouseClick(window.browseButton, QtCore.Qt.LeftButton, delay=1)    
    print("After mouse click")    
    #This is where I need to get the reference of QDialog and handle it

[nicoddemus]

Thanks! I would love a PR updating the docs with an example like this one.

Please close the issue if you don’t have further questions. 👍

[nicoddemus]

Is there any way to find the reference of a dialog when it is not added to any parent control? Else would you suggest to add the dialog as a child to any other control?

On way that I’ve accomplished this is to keep the reference to the dialog somewhere, for testing only. Then you can trigger your event in the next iteration of the event loop by passing 0 timeout to the timer:

class MyWindow(QWidget):


    def on_browse_button(self):
        self._test_dialog = QFileDialog(...)
        try:
            # do something with dialog
        finally:
            self._test_dialog = None
    

def test_filedialog(qtbot, window):
    def handle_dialog():
        while window._test_dialog is None:
            qApp.processEvents()
        # handle dialog now
    QTimer.singleShot(0, handle_dialog)
    qtbot.mouseClick(window.browseButton, QtCore.Qt.LeftButton, delay=1) 

I think this small hack is a small enough price for the reliability it brings to the table.