External resources

This page contains links to external guides for some libraries that are used in the project. If you want to implement a new device or a new feature, it is recommended to read the documentation of the library that is used for that feature.

PySide6

We use the library PySide6 for the graphical interface.

Widgets

In general it is useful to know what is a widget and how a Qt application works. It is a Python binding for the Qt library, which is a C++ library for creating GUIs. The PyQt6 library is a very powerful and flexible library, and it is the most popular library for creating GUIs in Python. It is also very well documented, and there are many tutorials and examples available online.

Model/View architecture

For complex tree and tables widgets, we use the model/view architecture. The python reference can be found here. This documentation contains the reference needed when working with the model/view architecture.

Jumping straight into the source code of an already working model can be overwhelming. An introductory tutorial can be found here. Following it and running the examples will help to get accustomed to the model/view architecture we use. However, this tutorial is in C++, so if you want to follow it, you will need to translate the examples to Python.

Qt Designer

When setting up widgets, it is often easier to use Qt Designer. This is a graphical tool that allows you to create and edit widgets and layouts much more easily than doing it in code.

Attrs

To create classes that are used to store date (data classes), it can be useful to use the attrs <https://www.attrs.org/en/stable/overview.html>_ library. The documentation is worth reading to understand how, why and when to use it. It is not a strong requirement to use attrs for classes, but it can be helpful to reduce boilerplate code. It works well when classes are data classes, i.e. classes that have several attributes and a couple methods that don’t perform complex operations. Otherwise, regular classes might be more appropriate.

Classes created with attrs and with type hints for their attributes can be automatically (de)serialized using the cattrs library. It also possible to create widgets automatically for such classes with caqtus.gui.autogen.build_editor().

Cattrs

When a class is created with attrs and with type hints for its attributes, the cattrs library can be used to automatically generate code the serializes and deserializes the class to plain data structures like dictionaries and lists.

cattrs is a Python library that allows you to un/structure custom objects to/from basic collections (dicts, lists, etc) that can be stored natively by many serialization libraries. This library is useful to put settings and configurations in permanent storage. It is possible to customize cattrs to handle custom classes and types. By default, it can handle attrs classes.