Beru

Up to now, Beru has just listed whatever files it can find in ~/Books. But it’d be better to store information about these files in a database, where we can also store titles, authors, and cover images. But we still want to automatically includes the files in ~/Books, so we need a way of going through all those files.

If you remember the previous episode, you’ll recall that we used a FolderListModel to access the list of files. In QML, a ListModel is the thing that holds the data that’s going to be displayed in a list. Usually, you can go through its elements programatically:

for (var i=0; i<model.count; i++) {
    var item = model.get(i)
    // Do something
}

But this doesn’t work with a FolderListModel—it doesn’t have a count attribute. Luckily, the music app people have a solution: Make a Repeater using this model, create an Item for each entry, and run code in its Component.onCompleted. Here’s the basic idea.

FolderListModel {
    id: folderModel
    // various settings
}

Repeater {
    model: folderModel
    
    Component {
        Item {
            Component.onCompleted: // Do something
        }
    }
}

It’s clever, but I do wonder why (or if) it’s necessary.