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authorsuper3 <me@super3.org>2013-05-20 00:30:00 -0400
committersuper3 <me@super3.org>2013-05-20 00:30:00 -0400
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+Multiwallet Qt Development and Integration Strategy
+===================================================
+
+In order to support loading of multiple wallets in bitcoin-qt, a few changes in the UI architecture will be needed.
+Fortunately, only four of the files in the existing project are affected by this change.
+
+Three new classes have been implemented in three new .h/.cpp file pairs, with much of the functionality that was previously
+implemented in the BitcoinGUI class moved over to these new classes.
+
+The two existing files most affected, by far, are bitcoingui.h and bitcoingui.cpp, as the BitcoinGUI class will require
+some major retrofitting.
+
+Only requiring some minor changes is bitcoin.cpp.
+
+Finally, three new headers and source files will have to be added to bitcoin-qt.pro.
+
+Changes to class BitcoinGUI
+---------------------------
+The principal change to the BitcoinGUI class concerns the QStackedWidget instance called centralWidget.
+This widget owns five page views: overviewPage, transactionsPage, addressBookPage, receiveCoinsPage, and sendCoinsPage.
+
+A new class called *WalletView* inheriting from QStackedWidget has been written to handle all renderings and updates of
+these page views. In addition to owning these five page views, a WalletView also has a pointer to a WalletModel instance.
+This allows the construction of multiple WalletView objects, each rendering a distinct wallet.
+
+A second class called *WalletStack*, also inheriting from QStackedWidget, has been written to handle switching focus between
+different loaded wallets. In its current implementation, as a QStackedWidget, only one wallet can be viewed at a time -
+but this can be changed later.
+
+A third class called *WalletFrame* inheriting from QFrame has been written as a container for embedding all wallet-related
+controls into BitcoinGUI. At present it just contains a WalletStack instance and does little more than passing on messages
+from BitcoinGUI to the WalletStack, which in turn passes them to the individual WalletViews. It is a WalletFrame instance
+that takes the place of what used to be centralWidget in BitcoinGUI. The purpose of this class is to allow future
+refinements of the wallet controls with minimal need for further modifications to BitcoinGUI, thus greatly simplifying
+merges while reducing the risk of breaking top-level stuff.
+
+Changes to bitcoin.cpp
+----------------------
+bitcoin.cpp is the entry point into bitcoin-qt, and as such, will require some minor modifications to provide hooks for
+multiple wallet support. Most importantly will be the way it instantiates WalletModels and passes them to the
+singleton BitcoinGUI instance called window. Formerly, BitcoinGUI kept a pointer to a single instance of a WalletModel.
+The initial change required is very simple: rather than calling `window.setWalletModel(&walletModel);` we perform the
+following two steps:
+
+ window.addWallet("~Default", &walletModel);
+ window.setCurrentWallet("~Default");
+
+The string parameter is just an arbitrary name given to the default wallet. It's been prepended with a tilde to avoid name collisions in the future with additional wallets.
+
+The shutdown call `window.setWalletModel(0)` has also been removed. In its place is now:
+
+window.removeAllWallets();