Setting the PyQGIS Maptool

Question

I apologize if this question was already answered, but I found a lot of examples on how to set the QGIS maptool in a application from scratch, but not inside QGIS (in a plugin).

In the examples I found, the author creates a toolbar icon, an action and a custom QgsMapTool action.

What I want to do, is something (that I thought it was) more simple: - I want to set the canvas maptool to be the QGIS native zoom in (QgsMapToolZoom); basically the same that happens, when the user clicks the zoom in icon on the QGIS toolbar; Note that I don't want to zoom in like this:

canvas.zoomIn()

But I want to set the current mapTool to zoom in, and let the user zoom instead.

I implemented it as follows:

        canvas=self.eaf.iface.mapCanvas()

        zoomTool=QgsMapToolZoom(canvas, False)

        canvas.setMapTool(zoomTool)

However this fails. QGIS unsets the current maptool (lets say, for instance pan) and sets a void maptool (represented by an arrow cursor and no action) I added this piece of code, after initializing the zoom tool:

        zoomTool=QgsMapToolZoom(canvas, False)

        act=zoomTool.action()
        print act            

And found out that the action of the tool is empty (None). I don't want to start an action, because I would like to use the native QGIS actions that are associated to the QGIS toolbar icons. How can I access the native QGIS zoom action and force my maptool to use it?

Thanks in advance for your time

Answer 1

You get access to the native mpatool actions via several iface.actionXXX() methods which you can trigger. For your case this is

iface.actionZoomIn().trigger()

or

iface.actionZoomOut().trigger()