How to show/hide a child QWidget with a motion animation?

I am working on an application with two children. One's a widget that functions as a toolbar, the second, below, functions as dashboard, on which information would appear. The latter can be shown/hidden with buttons on the former. Here's a screen-cast of the prototype.

Now I am looking at doing the same but with a motion animation whilst showing/hiding the lower widget.

In short: the effect should be giving the impression the entire application rises or开发者_C百科 falls progressively when toggling the dashboard.

In details: I would like the height of the lower widget to decrease until it is reduced to 0 and then hidden completely. Likewise it would increase slowly when showing the widget again. In the meanwhile the position of the application should change accordingly so it stays at the bottom of the screen.

How can I do that? I've never done animations on Qt before. If you don't have an answer, do you know of a quality tutorial that could lead me there.

NB: I am using PyQt.

I think you can get what you want by using a QPropertyAnimation that animates the geometry property of your widget. But IMHO this is the window manager's role to do what you want. Maybe you will have some headaches bypassing it (but I'm maybe wrong).

After better reading of your question, it seems that you want to use your own components to trigger the hiding/showing so the WM shouldn't be a problem.

As a start here is some code that animate a minimizing of a widget (assuming tbw is an instance of the widget you want to animate):

formerGeometry = QtCore.QRect(tbw.geometry()) # storing previous geometry in order to be able to restore it later

hideAnimation = QtCore.QPropertyAnimation(tbw, "geometry")
hideAnimation.setDuration(2000) # chose the value that fits you
hideAnimation.setStartValue(formerGeometry)
#computing final geometry
endTopLeftCorner = QtCore.QPoint(tbw.pos() + QtCore.QPoint(0, tbw.height()))
finalGeometry = QtCore.QRect(endTopLeftCorner, QtCore.QSize(tbw.width(), 0))
hideAnimation.setEndValue(finalGeometry)

hideAnimation.start()