Prepare your Qt apps for migrating to 200

[LucasDanzinger]

Later this year, the ArcGIS Runtime team will release version 200.0 of ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Qt, which will fully support Qt 6. Version 200 will be a significant update to the produce, as Qt 6 will enable us to support newer platforms, hardware, rendering APIs, and compilers (see our Qt 6 announcement blog post for more details).

As you may know, the move from Qt 5 to Qt 6 contains breaking changes that must be addressed to compile your app with Qt 6. The Qt Company has created a migration guide to assist you in porting your apps. The first two steps are critically important:

1. Upgrade your app to the latest version of Qt 5.15.  
2. Remove and replace deprecated APIs in your apps.

Where possible, Qt has attempted to deprecate APIs that will be removed at Qt 6, which gives developers an opportunity to remove their usage from apps before moving to Qt 6. To make this migration as seamless as possible, Esri is following The Qt Company’s plan, and has deprecated several classes, properties, and methods in version 100.15 and prior. Our plan is to remove these APIs from  version 200.

In lockstep with The Qt Company, Esri recommends that you upgrade your apps to the latest version of Qt 5.15 and ArcGIS Runtime SDK version 100.15. After upgrading, we recommend removing deprecated API usage in your apps. Doing these things ahead of time will make your migration effort much simpler once version 200 is available.

The next blogs in this series cover how to find and change deprecated APIs in your code. Because the workflow varies greatly between the C++ and QML APIs, there are two different posts. You only need to review the post for the API that you use.