Question

Can someone recommend a straight forward way of adding some type of graphical notification (status bar, spinning clocks, etc…) to my wx.Python gui application? Currently, it searches logs on a server for unique strings, and often times takes upwards to 3-4 minutes to complete. However, it would be convenient to have some type of display letting a user know that the status of the job towards finishing/completion. If I added a feature like this, I’m not sure, but I’m afraid I may have to look at using threads … and I’m a complete newbie to Python? Any help and direction will be appreciated.

Answer 1

Yes, you’d need to use threads or queues or something similar. Fortunately, there are some excellent examples here: http://wiki.wxpython.org/LongRunningTasks and this tutorial I wrote is pretty straight-forward too: http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2010/05/22/wxpython-and-threads/

Using threads isn’t that hard. Basically you put the long running part in the thread and every so often, you send a status update to your GUI using a thread-safe method, like wx.PostEvent or wx.CallAfter. Then you can update your statusbar or a progress bar or whatever you’re using.