When using py2app, is there a way to customize the traceback dialog that gets displayed? (Or show a different Cocoa dialog?)

Question

Is there an easy way to get any more control over the py2app traceback dialogs, or just a nice way to display GUI messages?

If I raise an exception in my py2app script, I get a dialog that says something like this:

MyAppName Error

MyAppName Error

An unexpected error has occurred during execution of the main script

MyRaisedError: This is the text that I can control when I raise the error.

It has Open Console and Terminate buttons. My script needs to check if a certain DVD is in the drive, if it's not, I want to show an error dialog and quit. I would like to have more control over it than this, as I can only change some of the text and can't control the buttons.

I tried calling osascript to do 'display dialog' via applescript, but it gave me an error like this: 0:19: execution error: No user interaction allowed. (-1713) I don't particularly like this way of doing it, but if it's all I can do...

I would really prefer not to include a big project like Cocoa Dialogs or something like a PyObjC project... the script itself is very tiny and I can't see adding 10x the meat of my script just to get the dialog.

Answer 1

Instead of using osascript, you can call display dialog via py-appscript which, if you don't already have it in your python site-library, can be installed via easy_install. This example works inside of a py2app-generated app:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from osax import *
import py2app

def doit():
    sa = OSAX()
    sa.display_dialog("Python says hello!",
            buttons=["Hi!", "Howdy!", "Duuuude!"],
            default_button=3)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    doit()

Answer 2

Just put a standard Python try/catch block around the section of code that throws the exception, then use NSAlert to tell your users they need to put the DVD in