How do I catch a pyqt closeEvent and minimize the dialog instead of exiting?

Question

I have a QDialog object. When the user clicks on the X button or presses Ctrl+Q, I want the dialog to go to a minimized view or system tray icon, instead of closing. How do I do that?

Answer 1

A simple subclass that minimizes instead of closing is the following:

class MyDialog(QtGui.QDialog):
    # ...
    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(MyDialog, self).__init__(parent)

        # when you want to destroy the dialog set this to True
        self._want_to_close = False

    def closeEvent(self, evnt):
        if self._want_to_close:
            super(MyDialog, self).closeEvent(evnt)
        else:
            evnt.ignore()
            self.setWindowState(QtCore.Qt.WindowMinimized)

You can test it with this snippet in the interactive interpreter:

>>> from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui
>>> app = QtGui.QApplication([])
>>> win = MyDialog()
>>> win.show()
>>> app.exec_()   #after this try to close the dialog, it wont close bu minimize