Getting a List of all ui GUI classes programmatically

Phuket2

@dgelessus, thanks so much. However, it makes me want to cry. Not literally, but still going through growing pains learning python. I really love python, but a lot to learn. Maybe it's my learning technique, learning out of order. Also going pretty slow, only ever doing python on my iPad. No external keyboard.
I apologise, this is more a Python language question than Pythonistia question. Did not realise that until I saw your response.
Thanks again, exactly what I needed. I would never have come up with this myself. At least not now.

Phuket2

@dgelessus , I am not sure if this was broken at the time or not. But if you want a list of ui elements aka controls this includes extras you don't want. Example ui.ActivityIndicator, ui.TableViewCell
From what I can see you can't filter them our without using there names. I have also tried numerous other ways, but I can't figure out a way to isolate only the user interface controls without having to get very specific 😰
Maybe there is a way i can not see.

dgelessus

There's no way to tell from code which classes count as "interface controls" and which don't. One solution would be to use a "blacklist" as you said, you could add a condition like and cls not in (ui.ActivityIndicator, ui.TableViewCell) to do that. Or you could decide based on the name (which you can access with cls.__name__) and do something like and cls.__name__.endswith("View").

ccc

isinstance() and issubclass() also can take a tuple for the second param as in isinstance(obj, (ui.ActivityIndicator, ui.TableViewCell)).

Webmaster4o

@ccc I love these tuple arguments when they're available. I use them all the time. I wish more of the builtins had that functionality, honestly, things like

replace(('Cats','Dogs'),'Animals')

would be really useful.

JonB

@Phuket2
I can understand not wanting to include TableViewCell... but activityindicator seems like like a perfectly valid element. It can be added as a subview, etc.

try is very pythonic... it would also let you support custom ui elements that you don't know about yet.

Phuket2

Ok, thanks guys. Interesting about the activity indicator. I have to take a breath and read about it. It's the 2 nd time something useful has popped up about that.
Well at least I know I was doing as much as I could now. I thought a good chance I was missing something

ccc

@Webmaster4o your .replace() takes a tuple idea is brilliant. (RTT has a nice ring to it.) You should propose it as a change to the Python Standard Library. In my book it is a great idea that would be broadly applicable. The Python community is looking for improvements that push developers to adopt Python 3 over Python 2 and this kind of improvement might fall nicely into that category. It would be fun to find out who the youngest PEP author is.... Maybe you could even break a record while contributing to core Python.

Phuket2

I am not sure what you think about the below pattern to get a list of ui controls in a list comp (I hope I am not embarrassing myself again 😱). I still struggled with it. I used vars(ui).values() instead of playing with dir. I can see the vars way returns a lot of data to iterate through. But it looks the most conise way to me.
But I did many variations. Start to get a brain freeze after a while. I kept in ActivityIndicator, but still appreciate the comments about passing tuples to issublass for example. I didn't know about that. Well, I don't know most. But I did try the notation, worked as advertised.

import ui

x = [cls for cls in vars(ui).values() if hasattr(cls, 'alpha') and not issubclass(cls, ui.TableViewCell)]
print x, len(x)

dgelessus

@ccc I doubt a PEP would be necessary for this. @Webmaster4o The idea sounds good though.

Phuket2

@dgelessus , oops sorry I now see where I got the vars.values() from. I thought I had found it in stackflow. Sorry, you give the complete answer already. I must have seen it last night and it stayed in my head. It still took me a while to get to your solution today 😂😂 sorry, I really didn't mean to plagiarize you. But I just realised I did.

Edit. Was a BLE (BlackLabelError) I think there should be a PEP for that 🤕