Book Image

Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, 2nd edition - Second Edition

By : Alan D. Moore
4.5 (2)
Book Image

Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, 2nd edition - Second Edition

4.5 (2)
By: Alan D. Moore

Overview of this book

Tkinter is widely used to build GUIs in Python due to its simplicity. In this book, you’ll discover Tkinter’s strengths and overcome its challenges as you learn to develop fully featured GUI applications. Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, Second Edition, will not only provide you with a working knowledge of the Tkinter GUI library, but also a valuable set of skills that will enable you to plan, implement, and maintain larger applications. You’ll build a full-blown data entry application from scratch, learning how to grow and improve your code in response to continually changing user and business needs. You’ll develop a practical understanding of tools and techniques used to manage this evolving codebase and go beyond the default Tkinter widget capabilities. You’ll implement version control and unit testing, separation of concerns through the MVC design pattern, and object-oriented programming to organize your code more cleanly. You’ll also gain experience with technologies often used in workplace applications, such as SQL databases, network services, and data visualization libraries. Finally, you’ll package your application for wider distribution and tackle the challenge of maintaining cross-platform compatibility.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
19
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20
Index
Appendices

Creating validated widget classes

As you can see, adding even very simple validation to Tkinter widgets involves several steps with some less-than-intuitive logic. Adding validation to even a fraction of our widgets could get quite verbose and ugly. However, we learned in the previous chapter that we can improve on Tkinter widgets by subclassing them to add new configuration and functionality. Let's see if we can apply this technique to widget validation by creating validated versions of Tkinter's widget classes.

For example, let's implement our five-character entry again, this time as a subclass of ttk.Entry, like so:

# five_char_entry_class.py
class FiveCharEntry(ttk.Entry):
  """An Entry that truncates to five characters on exit."""
  def __init__(self, parent, *args, **kwargs):
    super().__init__(parent, *args, **kwargs)
    self.error = tk.StringVar()
    self.configure(
      validate='all',
      validatecommand...