Qt client library¶

libdragoman-qt is the Qt 6 client library for Dragomand. It wraps the D-Bus API in asynchronous jobs, so a Qt application can translate text and documents, detect languages and manage language pairs without handling request objects and signals itself. Krakoman, the KDE System Settings module, the Plasma widget and the KTextEditor plugin are built on it.

It is developed as its own project, libdragoman-qt, and packaged in the same repository as Dragomand.

Install¶

Applications that use the library pull it in by themselves. To build your own, install the development package from the Dragomand repository (see Install):

The library needs Qt 6.8 (Core, DBus) and KDE Frameworks I18n 6.13 or newer. Its API is young: until 1.0 the SO version follows the minor version, so any minor release may change it.

Use it¶

CMake finds it as the DragomanQt package:

find_package(DragomanQt REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(myapp PRIVATE DragomanQt::DragomanQt)

Every call returns a Dragoman::Job, which finishes exactly once, with a result, an error or a cancellation:

#include <dragomanclient.h>

auto *client = new Dragoman::Client(this);
Dragoman::Job *job = client->translate(u"bg"_s, u"en"_s, {u"Добро утро"_s});
connect(job, &Dragoman::Job::finished, this, [](const Dragoman::Reply &reply) {
    if (reply.ok()) {
        qDebug() << reply.translations();
    }
});

• A job never finishes inside the call that created it, and can be cancelled. A missing language pair is installed on demand, with progress, unless the caller opts out.
• translate() can return sentence alignment (Reply::sentences()); translateDocument() sends whole documents through a memory file instead of the bus.
• detectLanguage(), listPairs() with Mozilla's quality scores, installPair(), removePair(), checkForUpdates(), status(), and config() and setConfig() with the configChanged() signal cover the rest of the daemon's API.
• Dragoman::languageName() names a language in the user's language.

Testing against a fake daemon¶

The development package installs DragomanQt/testing/fakedaemon.h. It starts a private dbus-daemon with a scriptable fake of the daemon, so an application's unit tests never touch the session bus or need real models. The library's own tests and those of every application above use it.

Other toolkits¶

There is no GTK library yet. Any language with D-Bus bindings can use the D-Bus API directly, and dragomanctl covers scripts (see Command line).