Accessing methods of nested widgets - python

Im working on optimizing my design in terms of mvc, intent on simplifying the api of the view which is quite nested even though Iv built composite widgets(with there own events and/ pubsub messages) in an attempt to simpify things.
For example I have a main top level gui class a wxFrame which has a number of widgets including a notebook, the notebook contains a number of tabs some of which are notebooks that contain composite widgets. So to call the methods of one of these composite widgets from the controller I would have
self.gui.nb.sub_nb.composite_widget.method()
To create a suitable abstraction for the view I have created references to these widgets (whose methods need to be called in the controller) in the view like so
self.composite_widget = self.nb.sub_nb.composite_widget()
so that in the controller the call is now simplified to
self.gui.composite_widget.method()
Is this an acceptable way to create an abstraction layer for the gui?

Well that's definitely one way to handle the issue. I tend to use pubsub to call methods the old fashioned way though. Some people like pyDispatcher better than pubsub. The main problem with using multi-dot method calling is that it's hard to debug if you have to change a method name.

Related

Best practices for binding properties to a callback in kivy

As a self learner I've found the kivy binding action (mainly in python) a bit confusing. I've seen in many source code and/or examples in kivy that some of the properties are bounded to a callback in the constructor, while others are not (though used in those callback). My queries are:
Do I need to bind every created (or, custom) or provided (by kivy) properties to a callback (whenever needed to keep updated) ?
In any case which is the better option, bind or fbind ?
Does scheduling a callback have any advantages (particularly during widget creation)?
My corresponding assumptions are:
Only bind those properties that are inter-related or inter-dependent along with those used for canvas drawing. Rest will be managed or updated internally by kivy.
Almost results in the same thing (except depends on the implicit or explicit naming)
As per Kivy-doc widget creation is relatively slow, that's why scheduling is necessary.
(This is a re-post of a topic that I posted earlier with the same title but got no response from the community.)
I have not found any descriptive, informative article on this so far.
I need your proper guidance, thank you.

Accessing a common data object in a PyQt application

I have a GUI programmed in PyQt with many widgets and different windows, etc. The data for the GUI is stored in a python object. This object should be reachable from every widget in the program. Where should I put this object?
Right now I have it in the QMainWindow instance that is used for the program's main window. The problem is that it is hard to reach the QMainWindow object from deeply nested widgets. It seems much simpler to use the QApplication instance for that, because you can get it with QtCore.QCoreApplication.instance() (as shown in this answer). However, I couldn't find any other examples encouraging you to change the QApplication class, so I wonder if it really should be used that way.
What approach would you suggest?
The correct approach is to put this data/settings object in a separate module. This can then be simply imported wherever it is needed. Ideally, the module (and the code which creates the data/settings object) should be largely independent from the rest of the application.
There is no real value in tying the data/settings object to the application instance, since you would still have to import either QApplication or qApp to access it anyway. And the same thing applies to the QMainWindow - it just moves the problem to a different location, and adds an unnecessary layer of indirection. Another big problem with this approach is that the data/settings object cannot be accessed until an instance of the application or main window becomes available. Very often, the data/settings object will be required during the initialisation of various parts of the application, so tying it to specific GUI elements can easily lead to circular dependencies, or other ordering problems.
I suppose the key design principle here is Loose Coupling: once you've decoupled your data/settings object from the GUI, the rest of the application can access it wherever and whenever it is required.

"Local" publish-subscriber pattern for use in MVC wxpython

Using wxpython in MVC, I looked for a way to let the models tell the controllers about changes. I found (py)pubsub, which implements a global notification mechanism: Messages are sent to one place (the pubsub Publisher), which sends them to all subscribers. Each subscriber checks whether the message is interesting, and does what is needed.
From Smalltalk times, I know a more "local" approach: Each model object keeps a list of interested controllers, and only sends change notifications to these. No global publisher is involved. This can be implemented as part of the Model class, and works in much the same way, except it's local to the model and the controller.
Now is there a reason to use the global approach (which seems much less performant to me, and might be prone to all the issues related to global approaches)? Is there another package implementing a local observer?
Thanks!
I'm not really seeing the subtle difference here. As far as I know, pubsub is the way to go. It's included in wxPython in wx.lin.pubsub or you can download it from http://pubsub.sourceforge.net/. You can put the listeners just in the models and the publisher(s) just in the controller or however you need to. Here are a couple links to get you started:
http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2010/06/27/wxpython-and-pubsub-a-simple-tutorial/
http://wiki.wxpython.org/WxLibPubSub
I've been playing around for a while to do MVC with wxpython and i know what you mean about pubsub being global.
The latest idea i've come up with is each view and model have there own observer.
The observers have weak references to their handlers and it all works in a separate thread so as to not block the GUI. To call back to the GUI thread I'm using wxAnyThread Gui method decorator.
There are 3 types of signal that get sent, for the model you can set which attributes are observed they automatically send out a signal when they are changed. then on both the model and the view you can send a message signal or a keyword signal. Each of the three signal types have to be unique per view or model as they are used to make a tuple that identify them.
model attributes
controller handlers are decorated with
#onAttr('attributeName')
def onModelAttributeName(self, attributeName)
When you bind to a method that handlers attributes it straight away calls the handler with its current value and then continues to observe changes.
Sending messages
Use the method
view/model.notify('Your message'):
The controller callback is decorated with
#onNotify('Your message')
def onYourMessage(self):
Sending keywords
Use the method
view/model.notifyKw(valid=True, value='this)
The controller callback is decorated with
#onNotifyKw('valid', 'value')
def onValidValueKw(self, valid, value)
The GUI is left knowing nothing about the models the only thing you add to the GUI is the view signaler, the controller attaches it self to this, so if you don't add a controller the view will just happily fire off messages to no one.
I've uploaded what i have so far on github
https://github.com/Yoriz/Y_Signal
https://github.com/Yoriz/Y_Mvc
Both have unit test which should give a bit of an example of what it does, but i will create some wxpython examples.
I'm using python version 2.7 and the Ysignals module requires
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/futures/2.1.3 for the threading.
Please take a look ill be interested in what someone else thinks of this way of approaching mvc or to point out something i seriously overlooked.

Synchronized Qt TreeWidgets

I'm new to Python and PyQt. What is the best way to keep 4 QtTreeWidgets synchronized so that the items are the same as well as all the attributes of all the items? These widgets appear in different dialog boxes at different times during a session. For a number of reasons, I need to keep as much of the existing code, signals and layout as intact as possible. The Model/View division would be the obvious first place to go, but I don't want to touch any of the methods that are used to access or update the tree. I'm planning to refactor the whole thing in a few months, but I need something quickly to carry me until then.
Since each QTreeWidget is a convenience class, each has its own data. The UI is maintained in Qt Designer and I don't want to keep it that way.
When each dialog is initialized, the tree appears. The application has a singleton class that all dialogs can use to reference its variables/attributes.
In the initialization of each parent dialog, couldn't I check to see if a 'locationTree' attribute exists in the singleton. If not, I would need to populate it with its initial state and have the tree in the dialog use it or a copy of it. Any time the state of the dialog tree is altered in ways that I can trap, I'd like to update the singleton 'locationTree' to mirror the change. Although there's a clone method on a QTreeWidgetItem, I didn't see a corresponding method for the entire QTreeWidget.
How can I accomplish this with the least amount of change to the existing code base and GUI layout?
John
Yes using the MVC facilities is the way to go ...
Even though you are using QTreeWidget you are still working with a class derived from QAbstractItemView therefore the model() and setModel() calls are available. Take a model from one of the widgets that you are creating and then set it in the other widgets. Whenever you change the data in one of the widgets the other widgets will follow suit as they are using the same instance of model.
If you need to maintain the same selection state in all for widgets (which parts of the tree are open or close) that might be a little bit harder but it might actually work by using the same selectionModel selectionModel() and setSelectionModel()
I'm sure you're right that using Model/View is the best approach.
But without an idea of roughly how many items your tree widgets will have, and how frequently they'll be updated, it's hard to weigh up alternative approaches. Also, what version of Qt are you using?
If the number of updates and items are not huge, one approach is to introduce a class that inherits QObject (so it has signals and slots), and make it responsible for keeping all your QTreeWidgets in sync.
By connecting signals and slots for each QTreeWidget to a single other object, you avoid the nightmare of having every tree widget know about every other one.

Implementing a macro recorder for a python gui?

I'm wondering how to go about implementing a macro recorder for a python gui (probably PyQt, but ideally agnostic). Something much like in Excel but instead of getting VB macros, it would create python code. Previously I made something for Tkinter where all callbacks pass through a single class that logged actions. Unfortunately my class doing the logging was a bit ugly and I'm looking for a nicer one. While this did make a nice separation of the gui from the rest of the code, it seems to be unusual in terms of the usual signals/slots wiring. Is there a better way?
The intention is that a user can work their way through a data analysis procedure in a graphical interface, seeing the effect of their decisions. Later the recorded procedure could be applied to other data with minor modification and without needing the start up the gui.
You could apply the command design pattern: when your user executes an action, generate a command that represents the changes required. You then implement some sort of command pipeline that executes the commands themselves, most likely just calling the methods you already have. Once the commands are executed, you can serialize them or take note of them the way you want and load the series of commands when you need to re-execute the procedure.
Thinking in high level, this is what I'd do:
Develop a decorator function, with which I'd decorate every event-handling functions.
This decorator functions would take note of thee function called, and its parameters (and possibly returning values) in a unified data-structure - taking care, on this data structure, to mark Widget and Control instances as a special type of object. That is because in other runs these widgets won't be the same instances - ah, you can't even serialize a toolkit widget instances, be it Qt or otherwise.
When the time comes to play a macro, you fill-in the gaps replacing the widget-representating object with the instances of the actually running objects, and simply call the original functions with the remaining parameters.
In toolkits that have an specialized "event" parameter that is passed down to event-handling functions, you will have to take care of serializing and de-serializing this event as well.
I hope this can help. I could come up with some proof of concept code for that (although I am in a mood to use tkinter today - would have to read a lot to come up with a Qt4 example).
An example of what you're looking for is in mayavi2. For your purposes, mayavi2's "script record" functionality will generate a Python script that can then be trivially modified for other cases. I hear that it works pretty well.

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