Example of the right way to use QThread in PyQt?

Here is a working example of a separate worker thread which can send and receive signals to allow it to communicate with a GUI.

I made two simple buttons, one which starts a long calculation in a separate thread, and one which immediately terminates the calculation and resets the worker thread.

Forcibly terminating a thread as is done here is not generally the best way to do things, but there are situations in which always gracefully exiting is not an option.

from PyQt4 import QtGui, QtCore
import sys
import random

class Example(QtCore.QObject):

    signalStatus = QtCore.pyqtSignal(str)

    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(self.__class__, self).__init__(parent)

        # Create a gui object.
        self.gui = Window()

        # Create a new worker thread.
        self.createWorkerThread()

        # Make any cross object connections.
        self._connectSignals()

        self.gui.show()


    def _connectSignals(self):
        self.gui.button_cancel.clicked.connect(self.forceWorkerReset)
        self.signalStatus.connect(self.gui.updateStatus)
        self.parent().aboutToQuit.connect(self.forceWorkerQuit)


    def createWorkerThread(self):

        # Setup the worker object and the worker_thread.
        self.worker = WorkerObject()
        self.worker_thread = QtCore.QThread()
        self.worker.moveToThread(self.worker_thread)
        self.worker_thread.start()

        # Connect any worker signals
        self.worker.signalStatus.connect(self.gui.updateStatus)
        self.gui.button_start.clicked.connect(self.worker.startWork)


    def forceWorkerReset(self):      
        if self.worker_thread.isRunning():
            print('Terminating thread.')
            self.worker_thread.terminate()

            print('Waiting for thread termination.')
            self.worker_thread.wait()

            self.signalStatus.emit('Idle.')

            print('building new working object.')
            self.createWorkerThread()


    def forceWorkerQuit(self):
        if self.worker_thread.isRunning():
            self.worker_thread.terminate()
            self.worker_thread.wait()


class WorkerObject(QtCore.QObject):

    signalStatus = QtCore.pyqtSignal(str)

    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(self.__class__, self).__init__(parent)

    @QtCore.pyqtSlot()        
    def startWork(self):
        for ii in range(7):
            number = random.randint(0,5000**ii)
            self.signalStatus.emit('Iteration: {}, Factoring: {}'.format(ii, number))
            factors = self.primeFactors(number)
            print('Number: ', number, 'Factors: ', factors)
        self.signalStatus.emit('Idle.')

    def primeFactors(self, n):
        i = 2
        factors = []
        while i * i <= n:
            if n % i:
                i += 1
            else:
                n //= i
                factors.append(i)
        if n > 1:
            factors.append(n)
        return factors


class Window(QtGui.QWidget):

    def __init__(self):
        QtGui.QWidget.__init__(self)
        self.button_start = QtGui.QPushButton('Start', self)
        self.button_cancel = QtGui.QPushButton('Cancel', self)
        self.label_status = QtGui.QLabel('', self)

        layout = QtGui.QVBoxLayout(self)
        layout.addWidget(self.button_start)
        layout.addWidget(self.button_cancel)
        layout.addWidget(self.label_status)

        self.setFixedSize(400, 200)

    @QtCore.pyqtSlot(str)
    def updateStatus(self, status):
        self.label_status.setText(status)


if __name__=='__main__':
    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
    example = Example(app)
    sys.exit(app.exec_())