Question

Part of the GUI I’m building using tkinter has a pop-up window that says “Please wait while the program is running.” then after it finishes the window goes away. I’m using the widget.after command to open the window and run the command. However if I pass the function I call arguments then the pop up window never occurs. Here’s an example:

def backupWindow
    self.restoreCB = Toplevel()

    message = "Please wait while backup runs"
    Label(self.restoreCB, text=message, padx=100, pady=20).pack()

    widget.after(10, self.runBackup)

def runBackup(self):
    <backup code>
    self.backupCB.destroy()

This runs fine and does what I want it to do, the window pops up while the backup runs, then the window closes after the backup. However, If I pass the and argument from the widget.after like the code below, the “please wait” message never shows up.

def backupWindow
    self.restoreCB = Toplevel()

    message = "Please wait while backup runs"
    Label(self.restoreCB, text=message, padx=100, pady=20).pack()

    widget.after(10, self.runBackup(mybackup))

def runBackup(self,mybackup):
    <backup code using mybackup>
    self.backupCB.destroy()

Answer 1

I would try functools.partial to wrap your call as in:

widget.after(10, functools.partial(self.runBackup, mybackup))

Or you could define a local function that takes no arguments but passes the parameter (which is in essence what functools.partial does).