[Tutor] OOP help needed

[Jim Byrnes]

On 07/27/2016 04:04 AM, Alan Gauld via Tutor wrote:
> On 27/07/16 04:44, Jim Byrnes wrote:
>> OOP has always driven me crazy.  I read the material and follow the
>> examples until I feel I understand them, but when I try to implement it
>> I end up with an error filled mess.
>
> That suggests that its not the OOP concept thats confusing
> you but the language syntax. How to turn the concept into code?

That's exactly my problem, which is why I am solving problems with OOP 
when it's not necessary.  I wanted the practice.

>> So I decided to give it another try.  When I got to the chapter on
>> tkinter I decided to solve all the exercises using OOP even though the
>> book solutions did not use OOP. The first one went fine:
>
> Actually not as fine as you thought. In effect you got lucky by
> making a mistake that still resulted in your code doing
> approximately what you expected. But it didn't really do
> what you thought it did.
>
>> import tkinter
>>
>> class Goodbye:
>>    def __init__(self):
>>
>>      self.frame = tkinter.Frame(window)
>>      self.frame.pack()
>
> You are using a global variable as your parent here. It would be
> better to pass that in as an argument. Or better still to make
> the call to Tk() inside the __init__ method. That's not really
> an OOP thing though just a general good practice issue.
> It's best to avoid relying on global variables in your
> functions.

Ok thanks.  When I wrote that I was mimicking the style used in the 
book. I have read about avoiding globals if possible, but didn't think 
it through.

>>      self.goodbye_button = tkinter.Button(self.frame, text='Goodbye',
>>        #command=quit)
>>        command=lambda: quit() )
>>      self.goodbye_button.pack()
>
> Here you assign quit to the button's command. That's OK because
> there is a top level built-in function called quit which exits
> the interpreter. It's a bit of a brutal way to exit your GUI
> but it works.
>
> But I guess you really wanted to call your quit method. Remember
> to access anything in your class you have to use the self
> prefix, so you should have said:
>
> command=self.quit
>
> or
>
> command=lambda: self.quit()
>
> Lambda doesn't really help in this case but it doesn't do
> any harm either.
>
>>    def quit():
>>      self.window.destroy()
>
> When you define a method inside a class you need to
> explicitly include the self parameter. So this should be:
>
>     def quit(self):
>       self.window.destroy()
>
> But there's a snag, you don't store the window inside the
> class. So self.window will cause an error. You either need
> a line like
>
> self.window = window
>
> in your__init__ method
>
> or use the global window variable like
>
>     def quit():
>       window.destroy()
>
> My preference would be to create a self.window instance variable,
> inside init()then access the self.window in quit(). You would also
> call mainloop() using self.window in your init()
>
>> if __name__=='__main__':
>>    window = tkinter.Tk()
>>    myapp = Goodbye()
>>    window.mainloop()
>
> So if you took my advice this section of code would look like:
>
> if __name__=='__main__':
>     Goodbye()
>
>
> and init() would look like:
>
> def __init__(self):
>      self.window = tkinter.Tk()
>      self.frame = tkinter.Frame(self.window)
>      self.frame.pack()
>
>      self.goodbye_button = tkinter.Button(self.frame, text='Goodbye',
>                                           command=self.quit)
>      self.goodbye_button.pack()
>
>      self.window.mainloop()
>
> If you read through that and understand it, it should give
> you the clues as to why the second one behaved as it did.
>
>

Ok thanks.  I don't want to belabor the point but I basically had it 
that way because I didn't know any better. Now I know of a 
different/better way to do it.

Regards,  Jim