The QGraphicsItemGroup class provides a container that treats a group of items as a single item. A QGraphicsItemGroup is a special type of compound item which treats itself and all of its children as one item. It is common to use item groups in presentation tools, when the user wants to group several smaller items into one big item in order to simplify moving and copying of items.

If all you want is to store items inside other items, you can use any QGraphicsItem directly by passing a suitable parent to setParentItem().

The boundingRect() function of QGraphicsItemGroup returns the bounding rectangle of all items in the item group. QGraphicsItemGroup ignores the ItemIgnoresTransformations flag on its children (i.e., with respect to the geometry of the group item, the children are treated as if they were transformable).

There are two ways to construct an item group. The easiest and most common approach is to pass a list of items (e.g., all selected items) to QGraphicsScene::createItemGroup(), which returns a new QGraphicsItemGroup item. The other approach is to manually construct a QGraphicsItemGroup item, add it to the scene calling QGraphicsScene::addItem(), and then add items to the group manually, one at a time by calling addToGroup(). To dismantle ("ungroup") an item group, you can either call QGraphicsScene::destroyItemGroup(), or you can manually remove all items from the group by calling removeFromGroup().

The operation of adding and removing items preserves the items' scene-relative position and transformation, as opposed to calling setParentItem(), where only the child item's parent-relative position and transformation are kept.

The addtoGroup() function reparents the target item to this item group, keeping the item's position and transformation intact relative to the scene. Visually, this means that items added via addToGroup() will remain completely unchanged as a result of this operation, regardless of the item or the group's current position or transformation; although the item's position and matrix are likely to change.

The removeFromGroup() function has similar semantics to setParentItem(); it reparents the item to the parent item of the item group. As with addToGroup(), the item's scene-relative position and transformation remain intact.

See also

QGraphicsItem, Graphics View System