GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Code-in 2010 KDE

Links that explain terms within menus

completed by: Valery Kharitonov

mentors: Akarsh Simha, Victor Carbune

Astronomy can have a lot of technical terms, and these can make astronomy in general, and KStars, inaccessible to a beginner. The aim of this project is to connect up to the documentation in the AstroInfo project (read about AstroInfo in the previous task description) from various menus in KStars. Wherever there is a technical term in KStars (eg: RA / Dec / Airmass etc in the Details Dialog, Catalog numbers / magnitude / constellation name in the context menu when clicking on an object), there should be a clickable link that takes the user to the corresponding page from the Astroinfo project.


To do this project, you should know basic C++ and should be able to learn to use a couple of Qt-specific things pretty fast.

Here's an outline of how you'd go about doing this: (It is not necessary that you understand everything here already, but you should be able to learn about this pretty fast. Look at the links and the source code or talk to the mentor(s) to understand what this is all about)

1. Write a method (possibly in the KSUtils class in kdeedu/kstars/kstars/ksutils.h) that acts as a generic slot for the linkActivated signal. It should take in a QString that describes the "dummy" URL that we're linking to and invoke KHelpCenter with the appropriate anchor that you can extract from the QString.

2. The .ui files define the UI, and they contain the text that gets displayed in the labels. The next step would be to modify the .ui files (either using QtDesigner, or by hand), to allow labels to have external links, by setting the option openExternalLinks to true. Then replace the text for the labels that contain jargon to include a HTML hyperlink to a dummy URL, that tells the slot (that you wrote in step 1) which anchor to open.

3. Make signal - slot connections.