Question

First question ever on stackoverflow. Been reading for some time now, while trying to learn Python and wxPython.

I’m writing a small app for presenting a large amount of data on the screen in a custom way. The data is stock information stored in objects in Python. Its about 100 stocks that should be presented at the same time on the screen. Every stockobject has 35 attributes, so it makes 3 500 attributes showing at the same time. And I want different fonts, size and colour depending on attribute. The background of each stockobject is changing depending on user (me) input.

So I tried making a interface with wxPython and a lot of StaticText controls. It took 5 seconds to load, timing it with timeit module.

Googling the net gave me an idea to draw the data on a device context instead. That took only 0.1 second. To make the app clickable I draw a second picture into memory with specific colours for each attribute. When clicking on the panel showing the picture I compare the coordinates with the DC in memory to calculating what was clicked. And now I am about to write a sizer routine so the user can change fontsize.

Well my question is quit simple: Do you think I chose the right approach?
Or is there a simpler more pythonic way to do this, without using StaticText that took forever to load?

Grids is not a solution for me, because I want the data to be presented in a very specific layout. To be able to do that with a grid, I would have to set the grid to 2px with and hight, and then merge cells all over the place…

edit:

link for downloading picture of the controll as it looked yesterday:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10606669/super.png

Ugly and not the exact way I want it to lok. This because of trying to write my own sizer routine.

Answer 1

You can try freezing the whole frame during the loading process, like this:

frame.Freeze()
try:
    # load all data
finally:
    frame.Thaw()

In general, though, having that many Window controls will hurt performance, so custom drawing is the only solution. You could simplify things a little by creating your own custom control for one stock (with its own EVT_PAINT handler, etc.) and then creating 100 of them. It should make your DC calculations easier. See Creating Custom Controls for more information.