ALAN GAULD wrote:
I still am having trouble understanding the use of "master" in
Tkinter. I think the problem is I can't find any reference that explains the
concept around master,
If you read the GUI topic in my tutorial it explains the concept
of a containment tree that is common to ost GUI frameworks
including Tkinter. All widgets belong to a parent or master
widget until you get to some kind of root or main window that
is the master odf all its sub widgets.
I'll make it my next stop.
When you delete a window you delete the master and it deletes
all its children. The children delete their children, and so on until
all the widgets making up the window are deleted. Thats how GUIs work.
Similarly if you add a widget to a window you must tell the new
widget where within the containment tree it sits, you tell it who
its master is. Usually the widget will register itself with its master.
put the word spam on a Button I found a reference that said you type the word
text followed by an equal sign followed by spam in quotes.
That's slightly different in that text is an attribute of the widget itself.
By assigning 'Spam' to the attribute you control the look of that particular
Button widget.
OK. That was the best example I could come up with to convey my
confusion concerning master. I could look at a reference and see that
in that context the word text had a special purpose, I couldn't do that
with master.
class CanvasEventsDemo(canvasDraw.CanvasEventsDemo):
def __init__(self, parent=None):
canvasDraw.CanvasEventsDemo.__init__(self, parent)
Here parent is being used instead of master. Thats quite common.
Its usage like this that tends to confuse me. If I change all
occurrences of of parent to Xparent the program runs. If I replace
parent with master the program runs. If I replace canvas.master with
canvas.xmaster I get an error.
self.canvas.master.bind('<KeyPress-o>', self.onMoveOvals)
Here the master attribute is being accessed. That is an attribute
of the canvas widget.
word master appears only twice in the entire script so it is not defined
somewhere else in the script.
It is an inherited attribute and is inherited by all widgets
although from where is a little bit mysterious - see below...
AttributeError: Canvas instance has no attribute
'masterx'
So the Canvas does not have a masterx attribute but does have
one called master. Maybe the bottom line question is where can I look to
see a list of a widgets attributes?
You can use dir() or help().
However in Tkinter it is further complicated by the mapping of Tkinter
to the underlying Tk widgets. It is not always 1-1 and some attributes
are implemented by the Tk tookit rather than at the Tkinter level and
these do not always show up in dir(). Master appears to be one of these.
However, on digging a little deeper it seems there is a subtle distinction
in Tkinter between the containment hierarchy and the geometry manager
hierarchy. I confess that I've never noticed this before and have only
skimmed the material(Grayson's Tkinter book) but it seems that master
refers to the GM hierarchy and parent to the containment one. In most
cases they will be the same but they can be different. But because of
this master seems to be implemented somewhere in the GM code
rather than the widget code...
In most cases you can ignore that - as I have been doing for the last 10 years!
:-)
Just use master as an inherited attribute that is present in all widgets.
OK, good. This is what I was looking for, an explicit statement of what
master is.
Sorry to be so dense about this but I just don't get it yet.
You are not being dense but asking rather deep questions which
probably need someone who understands the Tkinter implementatioon
to answer. You probably don't really need to know the detail, just accept
that master will be the attribute and it will be there in each widget class
you use.
I really wasn't trying to delve deep into the innards of Tkinter, it
just seemed like master was appearing like magic and I just wanted to
nail it down so I could get on learning Python.
If I get the time I will try to track this down further now that you have
piqued my curiosity.
HTH,
It does, I finally feel like I have a handle on it. Thanks for your time
and patience.
Regards, Jim
Alan G.
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