Qt - Resources are always lost in exe built with Visual Studio - visual-studio

Question

I'm trying to build a demo application with Qt in Visual Studio 2019. I used the Qt VS Tools in the Visual Studio IDE, and the Qt Designer to create my user interface. I also used the Qt SVG module in order to use SVG images for my user interface.
I achieved a working project, which works pretty well in debug and release mode, as long as I run it from the Visual Studio IDE. Now I would like to distribute it as an independent .exe file. For that I tried to create a zipped archive containing the .exe itself, the required Qt DLLs, and of course the resources the interface requires.
The compiled .exe can be executed in its own dir without problems, however none of the images I added in the resources are visible. I tried several ways to resolve the issue, and read many tutorials explaining how to use and/or embed Qt resources in the exe file. None of them worked for me.
I already tried to:
Simply copy the images in the .exe dir, keeping their dir hierarchy or not, but only the .png and .jpg images were visible, all the SVG were lost.
Compile a Qt resource file (.rcc) using the Qt rcc.exe tool, and add it to the Visual Studio resources, not worked.
Generate a .pro file using the "Create basic .pro file..." menu item (which also generated a .pri file) and add the following line, without success:
RESOURCES += MyResName.qrc
Adding the below lines in various location of my source code (main form constructor, main() function, ...). Nothing worked:
QResource::registerResource("MyResName.rcc");
...
Q_INIT_RESOURCE(MyResName)
Playing around and mixing the above mentioned ideas, nothing worked.
So can someone give me an as simple as possible explanation about how to correctly build an .exe file with its required resources, which may work in an independent way, using Qt and Visual Studio 2019, in order to distribute it, respecting the following constraints:
The project is a C++ project developed with Qt and Visual Studio 2019.
The project uses Qt, has a .ui file built with Qt Designer, which embeds several SVG and/or PNG/JPG images, and in which these images are visible in design time and if the exe is run from the IDE.
The project uses a .qrc file pointing the images, SVG or not, required for the application.
The images were added to UI components through the styleSheet property, like that:
image: url(resources/images/im-dropbox.svg) center center;
Other resources files, like .pro, .pri, .rcc, ... may be generated without problems. The required resources are well embedded in the generated files (verified).
Please help me, because this situation gives me headache.

Answer 1

I'll try to cover all the issues i see, in the order i see them.
First you don't use the files from resources, the Qt resource file paths start with :/ for example to set an icon from resources (in C++ code) you will do it like:
a.setWindowIcon(QIcon(":/images/window_title_ico.png"));
Now, to use resources directly from Qt Designer, you'll need to add your .qrc file for each ui file (click on that "edit" icon and then "Open resource file") after that you can set the icons from resources, see the print screen (Qt designer started from VS)
Note: you can double check the generated .ui file (it's an xml file) to see if the icon paths start with :/ then you know you have done it right. //in the .ui file you'll see something like:
<pixmap resource="resources/resources.qrc">:/images/acceleration.svg</pixmap>
//notice the relative path to the .qrc file and the .svg file path starts with :/
And lastly to display .svg on deployment, i noticed that you need to deploy the Qt5Svg.dll too (the one from the: PATH_2_QT\5.XX.X\msvcXXX_XX\bin) deploying only imageformats\qsvg.dll is not enough.
Hope this help to clear things a bit!