PyGTK, Glade, Changing the window view and threads

Question

Heya Everyone,

Forgive me if this seems like a stupid question, just so far no where on the internet can I find someone offering a solution to this and I just wanted to get some feedback from someone with more experience than myself (I've only been using python, pyGTK and Glade for 2 days now).

I have a UI window displaying and it updates with messages from a thread that is handling a bluetooth connection.

This is fine and I have the application closing and running quite reliably, the problem is, after a bluetooth connection is made I wish to maintain the bluetooth thread (i.e. keep the connection going) but completely change the UI of the main window.

Now the impression I am getting from pyGTK applications made from glade, is that the easiest thing to do is just open a new window. Is this really the best option? Can I cut the tree of widgets off at the root, maintaining the window widget but add on a new set of widgets from a separate glade file?

If opening a new window is the best option, am I right in assuming that the bluetooth thread can be kept alive during this transition, providing I update any callbacks?

Any help or pointers would be great.

Cheers, Matt

Answer 1

If i well understand the connection is strictly coupled with the window. This seems like a good example of aggregation and composition. Simple decouple the window from the connection. Without code or more information is impossible to be more accurate. After this you can use both the solution you proposed: create a new window with a reference of the connection thread or "detach" the whole widgets tree and attach a brand new one, simple use gtk.Container.remove and gtk.Container.add (gtk.Window derive from gtk.Container).

If this is not enough modify your questions and add some info and code.

Answer 2

I think you already know, but GTK (PyGtk) is thread aware and not thread safe, so, modifying the UI from another thread that is not the one that holds gtk's main loop will probably make your program to crash.

You can make use of the .glade files several times, you can use just one widget (and its children) if you want and ignore everything else, that's why gtk.glade.XML accepts a root parameter. This root is where your widget tree will start.

gladeobject = gtk.glade.XML(path_to_glade_file, root='widgetname')

You can safely hide the windows and keep it updated, and avoid the "new window" solution.