Is it possible to deselect in a QTreeView by clicking off an item?

QTreeView inherits from QAbstractView (http://doc.qt.digia.com/4.6/qtreeview.html) which has a clicked signal. The problem is that the signal is emitted only when index is valid so you can not achieve what you want with this signal.

Try to intercept the mousePressEvent instead. In the function you can find where the user has clicked and deselect selected item if needed.

Based on @Eric's solution, and as it only deselects if the clicked item was selected, here is what I came up with. This solution also works when you click the blank area of the QTreeView

#ifndef DESELECTABLETREEVIEW_H
#define DESELECTABLETREEVIEW_H
#include "QTreeView"
#include "QMouseEvent"
#include "QDebug"
class DeselectableTreeView : public QTreeView
{
public:
    DeselectableTreeView(QWidget *parent) : QTreeView(parent) {}
    virtual ~DeselectableTreeView() {}

private:
    virtual void mousePressEvent(QMouseEvent *event)
    {
        QModelIndex item = indexAt(event->pos());
        bool selected = selectionModel()->isSelected(indexAt(event->pos()));
        QTreeView::mousePressEvent(event);
        if ((item.row() == -1 && item.column() == -1) || selected)
        {
            clearSelection();
            const QModelIndex index;
            selectionModel()->setCurrentIndex(index, QItemSelectionModel::Select);
        }
    }
};
#endif // DESELECTABLETREEVIEW_H

Yassir

This is actually quite simple (in PyQt):

class DeselectableTreeView(QtGui.QTreeView):
    def mousePressEvent(self, event):
        self.clearSelection()
        QtGui.QTreeView.mousePressEvent(self, event)

Qt uses mousePressEvent to emit clicked. If you clear the selection before sending on the event, then if an item is clicked it will be selected, otherwise nothing will be selected. Many thanks to Patrice for helping me out with this one :)

The clearSelection does not work in my case. I'm using treeviews with a singleselection mode. Here is what I've coded:

class DeselectableTreeView : public QTreeView
{
public:
    DeselectableTreeView(QWidget *parent) : QTreeView(parent) {}
    virtual ~DeselectableTreeView() {}

private:
    virtual void mousePressEvent(QMouseEvent *event)
    {
        QModelIndex item = indexAt(event->pos());
        bool selected = selectionModel()->isSelected(item);
        QTreeView::mousePressEvent(event);
        if (selected)
            selectionModel()->select(item, QItemSelectionModel::Deselect);
    }

};

This works really fine.

Eric