Set QScrollbar width to prevent the need for horizontal scrollbar

Question

Is there a way to set the width of a QScrollArea so that a horizontal scrollbar is not needed? I know I can hide horizontal scrollbar by setting it's policy to always off. However, I want to make the QScrollArea large enough to not need it.

I'm currently somewhat doing this by using scrollbar.setFixedWidth(). Is there a better way, with something like scrollbar.setSizetoContents() or something similar?

As a side note, what is the best way to get the maximum width of all the widgets in a layout anyway?

Answer 1

I finally figured it out. Here is the hackish code I was using to find out the width of one of my sub-widgets in the scrollarea:

def _restrictWidthToFit(self):
    layout = self._scroll.widget().layout()
    if layout.count() > 0:
        fw = layout.itemAt(0).widget().sizeHint().width()
        sw = self._scroll.verticalScrollBar().sizeHint().width()
        w = fw + sw
        return w

The trick was I was previously setting this width when first adding the widgets into the scrollarea. However, the sizes aren't completely filled out by Qt at this point apparently. Thus, I used the above method to set the width by overriding the showEvent():

def showEvent(self, ev):
    super(UIFilterCollection, self).showEvent(ev)
    self._scroll.setFixedWidth(self._restrictWidthToFit())

At this point the width is filled out so it seems to work.

It's also worth noting that all of my sub-widgets are the same width already since they are in a

Answer 2

It looks like QScrollArea.setWidgetResizable could do what you want. But that will probably depend on what sort of widgets the scroll-area contains.

Also see the section on Size Hints and Layouts.