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Is there a way to store custom information with a widget?

For instance, say I have a list with 20 urls.

I create 20 buttons, one for each url.

I want to make it so when I click a button, a url opens. But i need a way to know which button is linked to which url, so when the button is clciked, i can pass the url to the event-handler function to open it.

Another solution I thought of to accomplish this, was to create a custom class that extends the Gtk.Button class, like so

class MyButton(Gtk.Button)
    def __init__(self, url):
        Gtk.Button.__init__(self)
        self.url = url
        ...

Then I could simply do button = MyButton(url)

But this seems like overkill. So I am wondering if i could store custom information on a widget itself.

sqram
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1 Answers1

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The simplest solution is to add the URL as additional data passed to the clicked signal handler:

# handle_click will receive additional url arg along with the button
button.connect('clicked', handle_click, url)

In PyGTK you can also add any attribute to a widget by just assigning to it, even without subclassing:

# handle_click will be called with button and can access button.url
button.url = url
button.connect('clicked', handle_click)
user4815162342
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    +1. But I would say the second suggestion is simpler than the first. – ptomato Nov 14 '12 at 10:38
  • @ptomato Matter of taste, it would seem; I mildly prefer the first option. There is also `button.connect('clicked', lambda button: handle_click(url))`, but that one easily [loses with loops](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2295290/what-do-lambda-function-closures-capture-in-python), so I omitted it. – user4815162342 Nov 14 '12 at 23:09