Question

I have a small program with many widgets like checkboxes, textctrls, statictexts,…

The values of all my widgets are stored in a dictionary. I’m saving the settings, e.g. this dictionary in a csv file. When I’m importing the settings from this file and update my dictionary, all my widgets should be enabled or disabled depending on the value in the dictionary by calling “def enable_controls”. But the widgets are always enabled, even if the value is “False”.

Here is the code snippet:

def enable_controls(self):
    self.Checkbox1.SetValue(bool(config.StartValues['Checkbox1']))
    self.Checkbox1TextCtrl.Enable(bool(config.StartValues['Checkbox1']))
    self.Checkbox1StaticText.Enable(bool(config.StartValues['Checkbox1']))

    self.Checkbox2.SetValue(bool(config.StartValues['Checkbox2']))
    self.Checkbox2TextCtrl.Enable(bool(config.StartValues['Checkbox2']))
    self.Checkbox2StaticText.Enable(bool(config.StartValues['Checkbox2']))

When I don’t assign the value dynamically, it works:

def enable_controls(self):
    self.Checkbox1.SetValue(False)
    self.Checkbox1TextCtrl.Enable(False)
    self.Checkbox1StaticText.Enable(False)

    self.Checkbox2.SetValue(False)
    self.Checkbox2TextCtrl.Enable(False)
    self.Checkbox2StaticText.Enable(False)

Am I doing the type conversion to bool correctly?

Edit: This is how I write and read from my csv file:

def onButtonSave(self, event):
    import csv
    getValues(self, StartValues)
    writer = csv.writer(open('Test.csv', 'wb'))
    for key, value in sorted(config.StartValues.items()):
        writer.writerow([key, value])

def onButtonLoad(self, event):
    import csv
    reader = csv.reader(open('Test.csv', 'rb'))
    config.StartValues = dict(x for x in reader)
    enable_controls(self)

Answer 1

As I said up in the comments, don’t use bool(config.StartValues['Checkbox2']) to do the data conversion. bool returns True for anything that does not evaluate to 0, 0.0 or an empty sequence or map. In this case, strings like "True" and "False" will both evaluate to True

Using string comparison or similar would be better, but beware of user-introduced typos if you let them edit the files!

Edit: use example…

def evalBooleans(value):
    """Assumes we're getting either booleans or strings!"""
    return (value if isinstance(value, bool)
                else value.lower() == "true")

cb2 = evalBooleans(config.StartValues['Checkbox2'])
self.Checkbox2.SetValue(cb2)
self.Checkbox2TextCtrl.Enable(cb2)
self.Checkbox2StaticText.Enable(cb2)