[Pythoncard-users] Tree and MultiColumnList and manually adding controls

[Kevin A. <al...@se...>]

In the questionnaire responses I've received so far, a few people have asked
about adding controls to PythonCard. They didn't mention specific controls,
but I'm assuming they probably mean wxListCtrl, wxTreeCtrl, and wxGrid. The
Tree (wxTreeCtrl) and MultiColumnList (wxListCtrl) components are already in
PythonCard, but they are very simplistic wrappers and not listed in the
resourceEditor component menu. The CodeEditor (wxStyledTextCtrl or wxSTC)
component is also already in PythonCard, which is what the codeEditor tool
uses.

You can put the MultiColumnList and Tree components in a .rsrc.py file and
use them now. Not all events are bound and if you want some other default
window style you would need to modify the component source. You can easily
do that by just making your own appcomponents directory with an __init__.py
file (to make the dir a package) in your application directory. The
resourceEditor does that so that it can provide its own StaticText
component.

There is a simplistic example of using the Tree component referenced at:

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/PythonCard/1284318

The MultiColumnList example is at:

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/PythonCard/1197833

In both cases, the methods will be identical to the ones for the
corresponing wxPython control (wxTreeCtrl, wxListCtrl).

If you wanted to manually add a wxPython control to a PythonCard window, you
would probably want to do that in the openBackground handler. Here is an
example of manually a wxButton control to the minimal sample:

from PythonCardPrototype import model
from wxPython import wx

class Minimal(model.Background):

    def on_openBackground(self, event):
        self.btnTest = wx.wxButton(self.panel, -1, 'Test Button', (0, 30))
        # now manually bind an event
        # the event method could have a different name
        # I just decided to follow PythonCard event handler naming
        # conventions
        wx.EVT_BUTTON(self.panel, self.btnTest.GetId(),
self.on_btnTest_mouseClick)

    def on_btnTest_mouseClick(self, event):
        self.components.field1.text = "hello world"

    def on_menuFileExit_select(self, event):
        self.Close()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = model.PythonCardApp(Minimal)
    app.MainLoop()


You should also be able to load a layout from a wxXmlResource that you
created with wxDesigner or another wxXMLResource tool. The catch is that
none of the controls would be in self.components and you would manually have
to bind all of the events you're interested in. I haven't tried this myself,
so there might be a gotcha or two.

Keep the comments coming.

ka