ObjectListView¶
An ObjectListView is a wrapper around the wx.ListCtrl that makes the list control easier to use. It also provides some useful extra functionality.
Larry Wall, the author of Perl, once wrote that the three essential character flaws of any good programmer were sloth, impatience and hubris. Good programmers want to do the minimum amount of work (sloth). They want their programs to run quickly (impatience). They take inordinate pride in what they have written (hubris).
ObjectListView encourages the vices of sloth and hubris, by allowing programmers to do far less work but still produce great looking results.
Without wasting my time, just tell me what it does!¶
OK, here’s the bullet point feature list:
- Automatically transforms a collection of model objects into a fully functional wx.ListCtrl.
- Automatically sorts rows.
- Easily edit the cell values.
- Supports all ListCtrl views (report, list, large and small icons).
- Columns can be fixed-width, have a minimum and/or maximum width, or be space-filling (Column Widths)
- Displays a “list is empty” message when the list is empty (obviously).
- Supports checkboxes in any column
- Supports alternate rows background colors.
- Supports custom formatting of rows.
- Supports searching (by typing) on any column, even on massive lists.
- Supports custom sorting
- Supports Filtering and batched updates
- The FastObjectListView version can build a list of 10,000 objects in less than 0.1 seconds.
- The VirtualObjectListView version supports millions of rows through ListCtrl’s virtual mode.
- The GroupListView version supports arranging rows into collapsible groups.
- Effortlessly produce professional-looking reports using a ListCtrlPrinter.
Seriously, after using an ObjectListView, you will never go back to using a plain wx.ListCtrl.
OK, I’m interested. What do I do next?¶
You can download a source package of the ObjectListView which includes the ObjectListView module, as well as some demo applications showing ObjectListView in action.
After that, you might want to look at the Getting Started and the Cookbook sections. Please make sure you have read and understood these sections before asking questions in the Forums.
At some point, you will want to do something with an ObjectListView and it won’t be immediately obvious how to make it happen. After dutifully scouring the Getting Started and the Cookbook sections, you decide that is is still not obvious. The Forum section is the place to find all your as-yet-unasked questions.
It may even be possible that you might find some undocumented features in the code (also known as bugs). These “features” can be reported to the project’s Issue Tracker and the status of your “feature” report can be tracked here.
If you would like to ask me a question or suggest an improvement, you can contact me here: jppx1@bigfoot.com.
Bleeding-edge source¶
If you are a very keen developer, you can access the SVN repository directly for this project. The following SVN command will fetch the most recent version from the repository:
svn co https://objectlistview.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/objectlistview/python/trunk objectlistview
There are details on how to use Subversion here on SourceForge.
Please remember that code within the SVN is bleeding edge. It has not been well-tested and is almost certainly full of bugs. If you just want to play with the ObjectListView, it’s better to stay with the official releases, where the bugs are (hopefully) less obvious.