gForms

A GUI form generator for editing basic to complex data structures, with type inference and validation.

Fields

The gForms utility may 'blindly' check the types and create fields accordingly, or may be helped by the definition of a Model. For certain input types this is necessary, as the value will not carry enough information about the type.

Nested structures

gForms accepts nested data structures definition, i.e., an entity may have multiple other entities in its definition, and will create buttons linking to the definition of these sub entities. Such nesting can be spceified by referring to another Model Instance of by a dictionary object.

The type inspection mechanism can deal with mixed or imcomplete model definition, i,e, A model definition will always be used if any of the entities (main/sub) have a known (model) name, otherwise a model is created and instantiated dynamically.

Lists

Lists of same-type objects are fully supported, alowing add, edit, remove of list elements, of the correct type. Lists of mixed types behave as objects - its values are editable but without add or remove capabilities.

Advanced - Model specification

Models can be specified by extending the ClassModel class. Fields must be of either

• base types: Int, Str, Complex, Float, Bool, Long, Unicode, Date, Time
• Lists or Dictionaries: ListOfStr, SUBCLASS of ListClassModel -> Other models: ModelInstance( other_model_class )

Templates

Models also accept data templates, which will render to a dropdown and live fill all fields when a template is selected.

The edit() function is the main entry point for editing a data structure.

Examples

1 Simple, with nested data

system = {
    'users': [ {'name':"F1", number:1}, {'name':"F2", number:2},  ],
    'location': 'Bytes Av, 16',
    'admin': {'name':"F1", number:1}
}
edit(system)

2 Defining a model

A more sophisticated version would be to define the model so that we can start with an empty structure, and objects having "User" or "System" as class name will be recognized:

class User(ClassModel):
    name   = Str
    number = Int
    _templates={ 'user1': {'name':"F1", number:1},
                 'user2'  {'name':"F2", number:2} }
    
class UserList( ListClassModel ):
    _inner_type = User

class System(ClassModel):
    users    = UserList
    location = Str
    admin = ModelInstance( User )

mysystem = System() #Empty, but structure completely defined

mysystem_alt = {    #Structure defined by individual fields, mixed objects and base values
    'users': ListClassModel(),
    'location': '',
    'admin': User()
}

Installation:

To provide Templates and work better with wxPython 3, a branch of traitsui shall be used. pip install https://github.com/ferdonline/traitsui/archive/gforms.zip

Also make saur wxPython is installed and available. With virtualenv you might want to use the --system-site-packages flag.

For bug and other reports please contact.