Application Development – Fixing ‘Cannot Assign to Non-Existent Property’ Error in QML

toolbaritems has been deprecated in Ubuntu.Components 1.1, so its use is strongly discouraged. It is maintained for backward compatibility, but the right way to add items to the header toolbar is now using head.actions.

The main difference between head.actions and toolbaritems is that you don't need anymore to add ToolbarButton items and then set their action property. All you need with head.actions is to specify a list of actions and then they will be automatically shown according to Ubuntu Touch patterns.

An example that shows how to use head property is the following (from official documentation):

import QtQuick 2.0
import Ubuntu.Components 1.1

MainView {
     width: units.gu(48)
     height: units.gu(60)
     Page {
         title: i18n.tr("Example page")
         Label {
             anchors.centerIn: parent
             text: i18n.tr("Hello world!")
        }
        head.actions: [
             Action {
                 iconName: "search"
                 text: i18n.tr("Search")
             },
             Action {
                 iconName: "contacts"
                 text: i18n.tr("Contacts")
             }
        ]
    }
}

There are some other useful settings for PageHead (e.g. custom Item to show instead of the title), so I'd suggest you to take a look at this page.

If you are running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, these new APIs are not available, due to their dependence on Qt 5.3. You can solve this issue following this link .

This property holds the name of the object. The objectName is a QString property of QObject which defaults to an empty QString.

You usually set this property when you need to find QML elements from Qt. By this way the signals, properties and functions of a QML element can be accessed from Qt (C++) code.

Autopilot tests use this property to introspect your application.

From Interacting with QML Objects from C++:

QML components are essentially object trees with children that have siblings and their own children. Child objects of QML components can be located using the QObject::objectName property with QObject::findChild(). For example, if the root item in MyItem.qml had a child Rectangle item:

import QtQuick 2.0

Item {
    width: 100; height: 100

    Rectangle {
        anchors.fill: parent
        objectName: "rect"
    }
}

The child could be located like this:

QObject *rect = object->findChild<QObject*>("rect");
if (rect)
    rect->setProperty("color", "red");

Note that an object may have multiple children with the same objectName. For example, ListView creates multiple instances of its delegate, so if its delegate is declared with a particular objectName, the ListView will have multiple children with the same objectName. In this case, QObject::findChildren() can be used to find all children with a matching objectName.

Warning: While it is possible to use C++ to access and manipulate QML objects deep into the object tree, we recommend that you do not take this approach outside of application testing and prototyping. One strength of QML and C++ integration is the ability to implement the QML user interface separately from the C++ logic and dataset backend, and this strategy breaks if the C++ side reaches deep into the QML components to manipulate them directly. This would make it difficult to, for example, swap a QML view component for another view, if the new component was missing a required objectName. It is better for the C++ implementation to know as little as possible about the QML user interface implementation and the composition of the QML object tree.

If an objectName is needed for testing, this is definitely worth it. objectName’s should obviously not be added when not needed. When adding them, the general QML guidelines for performance should be followed.

Source: What is the impact on memory of adding objectNames to QML items?