One line of code rocked my world

[Edward K. Ream]

Issue #1591 concerns disappearing icons in the todo.py plugin, but only for recent versions of pyqt. This post discusses a discovery I made while studying the code.

The todo.py plugin uses todo.ui. This is an xml file created by Qt Designer. Qt can create the entire UI with a single call to uic.loadUiType(<<path to todo.ui>>)

I've known about this capability for 15+ years, but I never really paid attention to it because I thought that using a .ui file was inflexible. But that's totally wrong.

This line from todo.py showed me the truth:

self.ui.UI.txtDetails.setText(txt)

Originally I had planned to create an alternate version of todo.ui that would replace icons in the various buttons with text.  So I was pretty familiar with the structure of todo.ui. From that study, I knew that txtDetails is a name of an xml element:

<widget class="QFrame" name="frmDetails">...</widget>

I was discussing this issue with Rebecca two night ago when I suddenly realized that  there is no need for an alternate todo.ui.  Instead, the patch_1591 method contains the workaround. I won't show the entire method here, but the code to patch the "priority" buttons is elegant:

ui = self.ui.UI
# Add text and tooltips to all numeric priority buttons.
for i in range(10):
    button = getattr(ui, f"butPri{i}")
    button.setText(f"{i}")
    button.setToolTip(f"Priority {i}")

Oh my.  I immediately saw that I could use the same pattern to patch any attribute of any python object created by loadUiType.  That includes, for example, all the layout objects in todo.ui. And really, all the other properties in todo.ui.

Summary

For at least a decade I have mistakenly believed that using a .ui file would create an inflexible ui. But that's completely wrong. I could have designed all aspects of Leo's ui with Qt designer, including docks, the Find Panel, etc., etc, while still retaining the ability to set and query the corresponding python objects.

In other words, lots of Leo's gui code is unnecessary.

Edward