Book Image

Python GUI programming with Tkinter

By : Alan D. Moore
Book Image

Python GUI programming with Tkinter

By: Alan D. Moore

Overview of this book

Tkinter is a lightweight, portable, and easy-to-use graphical toolkit available in the Python Standard Library, widely used to build Python GUIs due to its simplicity and availability. This book teaches you to design and build graphical user interfaces that are functional, appealing, and user-friendly using the powerful combination of Python and Tkinter. After being introduced to Tkinter, you will be guided step-by-step through the application development process. Over the course of the book, your application will evolve from a simple data-entry form to a complex data management and visualization tool while maintaining a clean and robust design. In addition to building the GUI, you'll learn how to connect to external databases and network resources, test your code to avoid errors, and maximize performance using asynchronous programming. You'll make the most of Tkinter's cross-platform availability by learning how to maintain compatibility, mimic platform-native look and feel, and build executables for deployment across popular computing platforms. By the end of this book, you will have the skills and confidence to design and build powerful high-end GUI applications to solve real-world problems.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Solving problems in our application


Your boss has brought you the first set of problems that need to be addressed in your application. First, in situations where the last reports of the day aren't able to be entered until the following day, the hardcoded date string in the filename is a problem. The data entry staff need a way to manually choose which file they'll be appending to.

Also, the data entry staff have mixed feelings about the auto-populate features in the form. Some find it very helpful, but others would really like to see it disabled. You'll need a way to allow users to turn this feature on and off.

Finally, some users have a hard time noticing the status bar text at the bottom, and would like the application to be more conspicuous when it fails to save data due to errors.

Deciding how to address these problems

It's clear you need to implement a way to select a file and toggle the auto-populate features of the form. First, you consider just adding controls to the main application...