pythoncard-users

[Pythoncard-users] PythonCard dialogs -- return values

[Aaron S. <az...@bu...>]

Hi all,

I'm new to PythonCard, so please forgive me if this is old-hat to you
guys...

I'm starting to use the built-in dialogs, and I'm confused about the
return values. The documentation says that all dialogs return a dict of
results, but the actual results are not a dict, but rather some other
undocumented objects -- different for each dialog, so far as I can tell.

For example, when I used the FileDialog, the result has members
'accepted' and paths -- but according to the documentation these are
supposed to be mapped in a dict. Any clarification expected.

        result = dialog.fileDialog(self, 'Open', '', '', '*' )

        if result.accepted == True:
            filename = result.paths[0]

Thanks!
Aaron
(and many questions to follow, I promise!)

Re: [Pythoncard-users] PythonCard dialogs -- return values

[Phil E. <ph...@li...>]

Aaron Stevens wrote:
> 
> For example, when I used the FileDialog, the result has members
> 'accepted' and paths -- but according to the documentation these are
> supposed to be mapped in a dict. Any clarification expected.
> 
>         result = dialog.fileDialog(self, 'Open', '', '', '*' )
> 
>         if result.accepted == True:
>             filename = result.paths[0]
> 

Hi Aaron:

The documentation is simply out of date, that's all. The behaviour you 
describe is as expected - when version 0.8.2 (I think!) of PythonCard 
was released, the dialog components were changed so that they are 
sub-classes of wx.lib.dialogs.

Where the documentation talks about a dictionary item, e.g. 
result['someName'], you just substitute result.someName.

The change was designed to make some bits of PythonCard more 'pythonic' 
and to make it easier to hand-roll your own custom dialogs.

-- 

Regards

Phil Edwards
Brighton, UK

Re: [Pythoncard-users] PythonCard dialogs -- return values

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

On Oct 31, 2007, at 1:58 AM, Phil Edwards wrote:

> Aaron Stevens wrote:
>>
>> For example, when I used the FileDialog, the result has members
>> 'accepted' and paths -- but according to the documentation these are
>> supposed to be mapped in a dict. Any clarification expected.
>>
>>         result = dialog.fileDialog(self, 'Open', '', '', '*' )
>>
>>         if result.accepted == True:
>>             filename = result.paths[0]
>>
>
> Hi Aaron:
>
> The documentation is simply out of date, that's all. The behaviour you
> describe is as expected - when version 0.8.2 (I think!) of PythonCard
> was released, the dialog components were changed so that they are
> sub-classes of wx.lib.dialogs.
>
> Where the documentation talks about a dictionary item, e.g.
> result['someName'], you just substitute result.someName.
>
> The change was designed to make some bits of PythonCard more  
> 'pythonic'
> and to make it easier to hand-roll your own custom dialogs.
>
> -- 
>
> Regards
>
> Phil Edwards
> Brighton, UK

There is another crucial element missing from the documentation. When  
we switched to using subclasses of wx.lib.dialogs, all dialogs ended  
up with at least three values for the result: accepted, returned, and  
returnedString. 'accepted' is a boolean, either True or False and  
returnedString is the string value of the button clicked by the user,  
which originally we just called 'returned'. 'returned' is the  
numerical return value of the button clicked.

Most of the PythonCard samples and tools just use the returnedString  
if they need something besides the boolean 'accepted', but that's  
problematic if you want to internationalize your application. In that  
case, you should use 'returned' and the wx constants for comparisons  
as shown in the table below.

returnedString   wx constant    returned
=======================================
Ok               wx.ID_OK       5100
Cancel           wx.ID_CANCEL   5101
Yes              wx.ID_YES      5103
No               wx.ID_NO       5104

Depending on the dialog you can just check whether the dialog was  
'accepted' or not and the 'returned' and 'returnedString' values  
won't impact your code. Typically, the only time you'll need  
'returned' or 'returnedString' would be for a message dialog or  
custom dialog where you care about if the user clicked a particular  
button like 'Yes', 'No', or 'Cancel'.

Note that the return value constants are not the same as the style  
constants such as wx.OK (4) and wx.CANCEL (16) provided for setting  
up the dialog. You can tell the return constants because they always  
have an ID_ prefix. This is a wx-ism, so there isn't anything I can  
do about it.

We'll need to add a few more tweaks to the dialog documentation in  
cvs before I upload them to the main site.

ka