Question

I’m trying create a gui using Tkinter that grabs a username and password and connects to a remote server and does a function. I slapped together some messy code and it more or less worked, but when I tried to recreate it in a tidy module, it broke. Its probably a newbie python error, but I can’t spot it. EDIT: to clarify, when it worked, the only class was setupGui and any methods were under that class. Now that I’ve separated the gui from the methods, its not working.

class setupGui(object):
   def __init__(self, parent):
      ##omited general frame stuff 

       self.userIn = ttk.Entry(self.topFrame, width = 20)
       self.userIn.grid(row = 1, column = 1)
       self.passIn = ttk.Entry(self.topFrame, width = 20, show ="*")
       self.passIn.grid(row = 2, column = 1)

       #Buttons
       self.setupbtn = ttk.Button(self.topFrame, text = "Start Setup", command = setup().startSetup())
       self.setupbtn.grid(row = 3, column = 0, pady = 10)

class setup(object):
   def__init__(self):
      self.userName = setupGui.userIn.get()
      self.userPass = setupGui.passIn.get()
   def startSetup(self):
      self.another_related_fucntion # about 4 related functions actually

if __name__ == '__main__':
root = Tk()
gui = setupGui(root)
root.mainloop()

And if I don’t have the command attached to the button, everything works fine (but obviously does diddly squat except look pretty). And when I attached the command, I get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "macSetup.py", line 211, in <module>
 gui = setupGui(root)
 File "macSetup.py", line 45, in __init__
self.setupbtn = ttk.Button(self.topFrame, text = "Start Setup", command = setup().startSetup())
File "macSetup.py", line 69, in __init__
self.userName = setupGui.userIn.get()
AttributeError: type object 'setupGui' has no attribute 'userIn'

Answer 1

In your code, userIn is set up as an instance variable of setupGui objects, not as an attribute of the setupGui class itself.

The simplest solution would be to merge the setupGui and setup classes to move startSetup in as a method of setupGui, then use command=self.startSetup when you initialize setupbtn—this calls startSetup as a bound method, and self should thus refer to the setupGui object, which you can then use e.g. self.userIn.get() and self.passIn.get() on.

If you’d rather keep the logic you have in the setup class out of the setupGui class, you can separate it out like this:

class setup(object):
    def __init__(self, username, userpass):
        self.userName = username
        self.userPass = userpass

    def startSetup(self):
        # as before

then add this method to the setupGui class:

def dosetup(self):
    setup(self.userIn.get(), self.passIn.get()).startSetup()

and instantiate the Button with command=self.dosetup. (I would personally make the setup class a standalone function, but I don’t know how complicated your startSetup routine actually is, so I assume you have a good reason for making it a class.)