wizard-tk-bridge

wizard-ui-bridge is the user-interface-independent way for a wizard to ask a user questions.

wizard-tk-bridge is the Tk (Tkinter) implementation of this user-interface-independent way for a wizard to ask a user questions. A wizard written for wizard-ui-bridge works out of the box if passed a wizard-tk-bridge as bridge.

Is this package for you?

This package is a good fit when one or more of these apply:

• You have a wizard written for wizard-ui-bridge and want to run it in a graphical user interface, without changing a line of the wizard.
• Your application is a Tkinter application, and its questions belong in real widgets rather than in a terminal.
• You want what a console cannot offer: a native file and directory picker, a month calendar for dates, help texts as hover tooltips, an editable table with add-row and remove-row buttons, and a whole form on one screen that the user fills in any order.
• Your program is otherwise a plain command-line tool, and you want to ask through a window without writing any Tkinter code of your own.
• You want to decide where the wizard appears: in a window of its own over your application, or inside a panel your application built.

This package is probably not the right one when:

• Your program runs in a terminal, or on a machine with no display. Use the console or Textual bridge of wizard-ui-bridge.
• Your application uses another graphical toolkit, such as Qt, wxPython or GTK. Write a bridge for that toolkit instead, by subclassing WizardUiBridge.
• You want a general widget toolkit. Use Tkinter directly.

Installation

wizard-tk-bridge requires Python 3.12 or newer, and the standard library module tkinter.

pip install --upgrade wizard-tk-bridge

This installs wizard-ui-bridge as well, since a Tk bridge is a WizardUiBridge.

tkinter belongs to the standard library, but it is not a pure Python module, and several Linux distributions leave it out of their base Python package. A standard library module is not something pip can install, so add it with the system package manager instead:

sudo apt install python3-tk       # Debian, Ubuntu
sudo dnf install python3-tkinter  # Fedora, RHEL

The usual CPython installers for Windows and macOS already include it.

Quick start

Ask a few questions from a program that has no window of its own:

from wizard_tk_bridge import WizardUiBridgeTk

bridge = WizardUiBridgeTk()
try:
    name = bridge.ask_text('Your name?', nullable=True)
    topping = bridge.ask_choice('Favorite topping?',
                                choices=('Mushroom', 'Pepperoni', 'Olive'))
    cheese = bridge.ask_yes_no('Extra cheese?', default=False)
finally:
    bridge.close()
print(f'{name or "Anonymous"} orders {topping}, extra cheese: {cheese}')

Every ask method blocks until the user answers, so the wizard stays straight-line code. No mainloop() call is needed: the ask methods pump the Tk event loop themselves and return as soon as the answer is in, and the program is not left running an event loop once the wizard closes. All questions of one session are asked in the same reused window, so the session does not jump around the display.

Every question also carries Back, Out one level and Abort buttons, which raise WizardBack, WizardCancelLevel and WizardAbort instead of returning an answer. Closing the wizard's own window, or pressing Cmd-W (Ctrl-W on Windows) in it, is an abort as well. The short example above catches none of them and simply lets them propagate.

Where the wizard appears

That is the one question the Tk bridge adds to the wizard-ui-bridge API, and the constructor answers it:

parent and area are mutually exclusive; giving both raises ValueError. The visible part is built on the first question, so a bridge that is never asked anything puts nothing on the screen.

modal (default True) decides whether the wizard grabs its window — or the window containing area — for the whole session, leaving the rest of that window unusable meanwhile. Only the application knows whether its other content should stay usable, which is why it decides. An embedded wizard normally passes modal=False, since keeping the rest of the window usable is the reason to embed rather than pop up.

close() is not optional. It releases the modal grab, destroys the wizard's own window or clears its area, and destroys the hidden root when the bridge owns one. Call it from a finally, because a wizard's normal way of ending is often a WizardNavigation exception rather than a return. Calling it twice is harmless.

What the user gets

WizardUiBridgeTk overrides every ask method, the inheritable ones included — above all ask_path() and ask_form(), where a graphical interface beats the base class fallback outright:

In a form, a field's help_text becomes a hover tooltip rather than an extra printed line, the float, time and duration fields show their accepted format as greyed placeholder text, and a date or date-time field adds a Pick button opening a month calendar.

show() appends to a message area kept above the current question, so earlier messages stay readable as the wizard moves on. They disappear with the window, so a final message needs a question after it to be seen at all — exactly as on the Textual bridge.

A graphical interface has no console to write side notes to, so error_file() returns a stream that discards what is written to it. Pass WizardUiBridgeTk(log=stream) to send those diagnostics somewhere real, such as an open log file.

Relation to wizard-ui-bridge

wizard-tk-bridge and wizard-ui-bridge are built from the same repository and released together, so a version of this package requires the matching version of wizard-ui-bridge, or newer.

This Tk bridge started out inside one application that used wizard-ui-bridge. It was moved into a package of its own so that it can be developed alongside wizard-ui-bridge and used by any other application.

Documentation

• Teaching examples and walkthroughs: wizard_tk_bridge/example/src/wizard_tk_example/README.md

• Public API notes: doc/wizard_tk_bridge_api.md

• Protected/internal API notes: doc/wizard_tk_bridge_protected_api.md

• Source repository: wizard-ui-bridge

License

MIT

Test summary

• Test result: 1084 passed, 9 deselected in 45s
• No flake8 warnings.
• No mypy errors found.
• No pylint warnings.
• No python layout warnings.
• Built version(s): 1.4
• Build and test using Python 3.14.7