Here is one option (your first suggestion):
dialog = QFileDialog()
layout = dialog.layout()
# for i in range(layout.rowCount()):
# for j in range(layout.columnCount()):
# try:
# print i,j
# print layout.itemAtPosition(i,j).widget()
# except:
# pass
line_edit = layout.itemAtPosition(2,1).widget()
line_edit.setText('Hello Stack Overflow')
dialog.exec_()
This gives you access to the QLineEdit in the dialog, which has a bunch of signals you can connect to.
I've also included the code I used to find this widget. I just iterated over the widgets in the layout of the dialog and found the indices of the one I was after. So if you need access to anything else in the dialog, you should be able to find it pretty easily!
Downside to this method: If the layout changes in a future version of Qt, this will break. I suppose you could make the algorithm more robust by looking for widgets that are instances of QLineEdit
, but there are always risks with hacky approaches like this!