# Creating a DoubleSlider in PySide/PyQt

Posted on October 31, 2014

In this article I will explain how I modified the Qt QSlider class to handle doubles. If you just want to see the (fairly simple) code, see this gist.

## Motivation

At work, I created a GUI to run a scientific simulation. The simulation produces data as a function of time, and the GUI can plot that data at any specified time. I was using a QSlider to allow the user to control the plot time. This worked great for large time scales; I could set the maximum value of the slider to the current maximum plot time, and moving the slider would directly produce the desired plot time.

However, this does not work for smaller time scales. One user ran a simulation that had a time scale on the order of microseconds. Since QSlider operates on integers, he couldn’t plot his data because the slider value was either zero or one! Therefore, I needed a way for the slider to keep track of arbitrary ranges of time using doubles.

## Implementation

We will need to subclass QSlider to keep track of the minimum and maximum values, and the current value, all in doubles. We will do this using private properties, and mapping the current range in doubles to a static integer range for the parent class.

One might be tempted to look at the documentation for QSlider to evaluate what functions need to be subclassed, but in fact most of the desired functions are in the documentation for QAbstractSlider.

Let’s start with the __init__ function:

class DoubleSlider(QtGui.QSlider):

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

# Set integer max and min on parent. These stay constant.
super().setMinimum(0)
self._max_int = 10000
super().setMaximum(self._max_int)

# The "actual" min and max values seen by user.
self._min_value = 0.0
self._max_value = 100.0

First, we set a reasonable resolution for the slider at 10,000 ticks. This number won’t change; we will change _min_value and _max_value and convert the slider position to a value relative to those two values:

    @property
def _value_range(self):
return self._max_value - self._min_value

def value(self):
return float(super().value()) / self._max_int * self._value_range

def setValue(self, value):
super().setValue(int(value / self._value_range * self._max_int))

This code is fairly simple. We are just converting the tick position (between 0 and 10,000) to and from a value based on our range (from _value_range).

Finally, the user can set the minimum and maximum values of the slider using the normal setMinumum, setMaximum, and setRange functions. We secretly assign the min and max values to our private properties:

    def setMinimum(self, value):
self.setRange(value, self._max_value)

def setMaximum(self, value):
self.setRange(self._min_value, value)

def setRange(self, minimum, maximum):
old_value = self.value()
self._min_value = minimum
self._max_value = maximum
self.setValue(old_value)  # Put slider in correct position

Notice that we end setRange with self.setValue(old_value). We do this to position the slider tick correctly within the new range. For example, if the old range was 0 to 1, and the value is 0.5, then the slider tick will by half-way in between the endpoints. However, if we change the maximum to 2, then the slider tick needs to by one quarter of the slider length away from the left side.

For a cherry on top, I created a convenience function to find the current proportion of the slider value relative to the value range:

    def proportion(self):
return (self.value() - self._min_value) / self._value_range

## Conclusion

We have created a QSlider subclass that can handle doubles instead of using just integers. For all of the code, see this gist.