[Pythoncard-users] wrapping wx.Notebook

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

 From an earlier message:
"It is probably time for a separate discussion thread on the issues and 
possible solutions such as treating each page as a type of child window 
where only the components of the child window resource are used. I'm 
just brainstorming here. You would end up with a separate source and 
resource file for each tab/page. I guess the references to each tab 
layout would end up being something like 
self.components.notebook[0].components.field1, etc. where each page 
(window) of the notebook is referenced via a list."

I sat down after the earlier posts about Notebook and did some 
experiments. I created a Notebook component and made a simple sample 
that uses the Notebook component and then manually adds a Panel with a 
TextCtrl to the notebook. That worked fine and the resourceEditor 
worked with the Notebook component too on the first try, though of 
course there weren't any page attributes to complicate matters. Then I 
started trying to add existing backgrounds as pages in the 
on_initialize method. You can't add a wx.Frame as a notebook page and 
PythonCard backgrounds subclass wx.Frame so that didn't work.

I was able to get it to work by making a PageBackground class that is 
almost identical to Background except that instead of a wx.Frame it 
subclasses wx.Panel. Of course, many of the features of a Background 
don't make any sense for a notebook page, so I commented out the 
menubar, statusBar, and all of the events except idle. I had to make 
some further tweaks to the event binding and dispatch to correctly deal 
with the notebook pages without breaking events in Background and 
CustomDialogs, but it all seems to be working now. I made a sample that 
uses the minimal and widgets backgrounds without any changes except 
that instead of model.Background, the Minimal and WidgetsTest 
background subclass model.PageBackground.

Since this was a fairly quick "hack" I hesitate to check it into cvs 
without some discussion on the subject.

If we went with a solution like this I would probably modify the 
resourceEditor to support a new PageBackground template type. A 
PageBackground is basically going to be like a Background, but there 
won't be any menus, statusBar, etc., otherwise the .rsrc.py files will 
be almost identical to keep things simple. You would edit each page of 
the notebook separately just like you do different backgrounds today. 
If and when the resourceEditor is changed to allow editing of multiple 
windows at once that would be a little less clunky.

The notebook component wouldn't have an attribute list for all the 
pages, instead you would add those manually by calling addPage, most 
likely in your on_initialize method. I made a pageWindow function that 
is almost identical to the childWindow function so that adding a page 
looks something like this:

page = model.pageWindow(self.components.notebook, minimal.Minimal)
self.components.notebook.AddPage(page, 'minimal', True)

Since I didn't hide the wxPython methods behind a list interface, 
accessing a elements of the child pages look like:

print self.components.notebook.GetPage(0).components.field1.text

So, will people be happy with this kind of solution? Any alternative 
suggestions? If I check this into cvs does anyone have a app or dialog 
they've been wanting to do that needs a wx.Notebook so we would have a 
decent test case to flesh out other issues?

ka