 If you've been studying the cute documentation all or you watch any of the videos So here people talk about the item QML type and it's this elusive thing And it says it's a basic visual type and you dive into the documentation and it gets very confusing very quick because it says The item type is a basic type for all visual items. However The item object has no visual appearance Huh? What does that really mean? Why does this thing even exist? I mean can it get any more confusing? Okay, so to break this down if you think of this in terms of cute Let's think about the cute library is the cute core for example Q object is one of the most useless objects, but it's the base class of everything You can't really do a whole lot with just plain old Q object However, Q object is a base class for everything and item is the QML version of the Q object It's the base type here, and if you look at it you see why It defines anchors. It defines any lazing children the children rectangle clipping data on and on and on and on So all these cool things that we've been playing from X Y and Z all come from this item class and Their example here actually really sums it up. They have an item and then images in it So really what this is meant to be is a container if you will or a parent for other objects It's not really meant to be a self-contained object. Let's go ahead and demonstrate what I mean here So we're gonna say QML beginners, and this is for one It's gonna leave all the defaults there and we're gonna make the most useless application on the planet but first I'm gonna put in some notes non-visual Item class I have to say non-visual because somebody will download this code and go Well, nothing was displayed and then I have to stop and say hey watch the video So we're gonna make the item here And we're gonna go down here and you see how it just has a template of id name So let's go ahead and do that and we can go ahead and set an anchor if we even wanted to and let's actually give it a width And a height Let's try giving it a color. Oh, no, there's no color. There's color animations and columns, but We can't really do that Huh, all right, so let's save and run see what this looks like well There's nothing there, but actually there is It's just invisible because we can't set a visual appearance for this But what we can do is we can do something like this Let me say rectangle whoopsie Got a little my hub myself there. So rectangle Set the color of this thing to red and let's drop an anchor here I'm gonna say anchors fill and we want to fill the parent So what this is gonna do is it's gonna take this rectangle and say hey look at your parent this guy and Fill that thing. It's gonna be a hundred by hundred centered in its parent, which is the window See The power of the item component doesn't really come into play until you get a little bit more advanced in QML And that's why it's one of the most misunderstood terms because they push this on you early because it is the base for all visual types But it itself is non-visual and it makes no sense why this thing even exists It exists solely so that you can make your own Components and you can say I want to define my own custom object What's up everybody? This is Brian. I hope you enjoyed this video It's part of a larger series out on you to me calm called QML for beginners the QML for beginners course assumes You know absolutely zero QML. You're just starting off and it's designed specifically for Q5 I will re-record the entire series when Qt 6 comes out And just know that it's over a hundred videos and 13 and a half hours of video on-demand I'll put a link below so you can get a highly discounted rate and Before you dive in just understand it covers a lot more than what I can put into this list everything from what's QML to animations to C++ integration JavaScript and on and on and on But one of the requirements up front is you have to know Qt core You should have some C++ under your belt and be very familiar with Qt 5 in case you have none of that I do have some courses for Qt core beginners Intermediate and advanced out on you to me as well. Hope to see you there