dragArea only works if onGestureStart signal is defined

This is by design. It mimics the (intended) behavior of QtQuick's MouseArea. If you don't have a signal handler defined for the events, then it's assumed that you do not accept the events. I thought I had documented this, but apparently I hadn't.

Is there a use case for when you want updates or ends without begins? If there's no use case I'll still leave this bug open as a reminder to document this behavior.

With regards the MouseArea, when you say intended, I guess you don't mean actual, as I am able to set a onReleased signal handler which is triggered as expected without the need for a prior onPressed signal handler being set.

The use case for having a gestureUpdate signal handler without the need for a gestureStart signal handler would be in the case of triggering something when a certain condition has been met, for example:

if ( centroid.current.y < centroid.initial.y - 20 ) // do something

As there is no need to set the initial co-ordinate like I would do in a MouseArea as this is stored as centroid.initial already?

For example, in a MouseArea I would do something like:

MouseArea {
    property real initialY : 0
    onPressed : initialY = mouseY
    onReleased : {
        if ( mouseY < initialY - 20 ) // so something
    }
}

Right now the code checks if anyone is listening to onGestureStart, centroid.onOriginalChanged, centroid.onCurrentChanged, and onActiveChanged. After thinking about this some more I feel this is a bit broken as some things cause gesture acceptance and others do not.

I now think we should accept the gesture if anyone is listening to any signals emitted by the area, including onGestureUpdate.

This bug was fixed in the package utouch-qml - 1.0.4-0ubuntu1

---------------
utouch-qml (1.0.4-0ubuntu1) oneiric; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    - Fixes issue with gesture acceptance (LP: #823190)
    - Fixes error when run under qmlviewer -frameless (LP: #823194)
    - Documentation now reflects whether gesture area is continuous or
      instantaneous (LP: #823819)
 -- Chase Douglas <email address hidden> Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:06:49 -0700