Getting the widget that triggered an Event?
def f(event):
caller = event.widget
You have a couple options. One way is to access the widget
attribute of the event object. Another way is to pass an object reference in to your function. Here's an example that uses one of each.
import Tkinter as tk
def onClickA(event):
print "you clicked on", event.widget
event.widget.config(text="Thank you!")
def onClickB(event, obj):
print "you clicked on", obj
obj.config(text="Thank you!")
root = tk.Tk()
l1 = tk.Label(root, text="Click me")
l2 = tk.Label(root, text="No, click me!")
l1.pack()
l2.pack()
l1.bind("<1>", onClickA)
l2.bind("<1>", lambda event, obj=l2: onClickB(event, obj))
root.mainloop()
Sounds like all your widgets are sharing an event handler. This excerpt from the Tkinter 8.5 Reference by John W. Shipman - NM Tech, may help.
54.7. The extra arguments trick
Sometimes you would like to pass other arguments to a handler besides the event.
Here is an example. Suppose your application has an array of ten checkbuttons whose widgets are stored in a list
self.cbList
, indexed by the checkbutton number inrange(10)
.Suppose further that you want to write one handler named
.__cbHandler
for<Button-1>
events in all ten of these checkbuttons. The handler can get the actualCheckbutton
widget that triggered it by referring to the.widget
attribute of theEvent
object that gets passed in, but how does it find out that checkbutton's index inself.cbList
?It would be nice to write our handler with an extra argument for the checkbutton number, something like this:
def __cbHandler(self, event, cbNumber):
But event handlers are passed only one argument, the event. So we can't use the function above because of a mismatch in the number of arguments.
Fortunately, Python's ability to provide default values for function arguments gives us a way out. Have a look at this code:
def __createWidgets(self): ... self.cbList = [] # Create the checkbutton list for i in range(10): cb = Checkbutton(self, ...) self.cbList.append(cb) cb.grid(row=1, column=i) def handler(event, self=self, i=i): # [1] return self.__cbHandler(event, i) cb.bind("<Button-1>", handler) ... def __cbHandler(self, event, cbNumber): ...
[1]
These lines define a new functionhandler
that expects three arguments. The first argument is theEvent
object passed to all event handlers, and the second and third arguments will be set to their default values?the extra arguments we need to pass it.This technique can be extended to supply any number of additional arguments to handlers.
A slightly more concise way to do this, as @Bryan Oakley does for the second button in his answer, is to define each handler function in-line with a lambda
expression, i.e.:
def __createWidgets(self):
...
self.cbList = [] # Create the checkbutton list
for i in range(10):
cb = Checkbutton(self, ...)
self.cbList.append(cb)
cb.grid(row=1, column=i)
cb.bind("<Button-1>", lambda event, self=self, i=i:
self.__cbHandler(event, i))
...
def __cbHandler(self, event, cbNumber):
...