5.11. Add-on GUI advanced features

The pyanaconda package contains several helper and utility functions, as well as constructs which may be used by hubs and spokes. Most of them are located in the pyanaconda.ui.gui.utils package.

The sample Hello World add-on demonstrates usage of the englightbox content manager which Anaconda also uses. This content manager can put a window into a lightbox to increase its visibility and focus it to prevent users interacting with the underlying window. To demonstrate this function, the sample add-on contains a button which opens a new dialog window; the dialog itself is a special HelloWorldDialog inheriting from the GUIObject class, which is defined in pyanaconda.ui.gui.init.

The dialog class defines the run method that runs and destroys an internal Gtk dialog accessible through the self.window attribute, which is populated by using a mainWidgetName class attribute with the same meaning. Therefore, the code defining the dialog is very simple, as demonstrated in the following example:

        # every GUIObject gets ksdata in init
        dialog = HelloWorldDialog(self.data)

        # show dialog above the lightbox
        with self.main_window.enlightbox(dialog.window):
            dialog.run()

The Defining an englightbox Dialog example code creates an instance of the dialog and then uses the enlightbox context manager to run the dialog within a lightbox. The context manager has a reference to the window of the spoke and only needs the dialog’s window to instantiate the lightbox for the dialog.