Widgets basics

If you’re interested in Flexx, the first thing that you probably want to do is create a UI. So let’s see how that works, and talk about components, events and reactions later.

Your first widget

The Widget class is the base class of all other ui classes. On itself it does not do or show much. What you’ll typically do, is subclass it to create a new widget that contains ui elements:

from flexx import flx

class Example(flx.Widget):

    def init(self):
        flx.Button(text='hello')
        flx.Button(text='world')
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The above is usually not the layout that you want. Therefore there are layout widgets which distribute the space among its children in a more sensible manner. Like the HBox:

from flexx import flx

class Example(flx.Widget):

    def init(self):
        with flx.HBox():
            flx.Button(text='hello', flex=1)
            flx.Button(text='world', flex=2)
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The HBox and Button are all widgets too. The example widgets that we created above are also refered to as “compound widgets”; widgets that contain other widgets. This is the most used way to create new UI elements.

The init method

In the above example one can see the use of the init() method, which is a common use in Flexx. It is generally better to use it instead of __init__(), because Flexx calls it at a very approproate time in the initialization process. For example, when init() is called, the corresponding widget is the default parent.

Further, the init() gets the positional instantiation arguments: creating a component Person("john", 32) matches def init(self, name, age).

Structuring widgets

Flexx comes with it’s own layout system. (Therefore you should generally not use CSS for widget layout, though you can very well use CSS inside a widget).

Any widget class can also be used as a context manager. Within the context, that widget is the default parent; any widget that is created in that context and that does not specify a parent will have that widget as a parent. (This mechanism is thread-safe.) This allows for a style of writing that clearly shows the structure of your app:

from flexx import flx

class Example(flx.Widget):

    def init(self):
        with flx.HSplit():
            flx.Button(text='foo')
            with flx.VBox():
                flx.Widget(style='background:red;', flex=1)
                flx.Widget(style='background:blue;', flex=1)
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Turning a widget into an app

To create an actual app from a widget, simply wrap it into an App. You can then launch() it as a desktop app, serve() it as a web app, dump() the assets, export() it as a standalone HTML document, or even publish() it online (experimental). Later in this guide we dive deeper into the different ways that you can run your app.

from flexx import flx

class Example(flx.Widget):
    def init(self):
        flx.Label(text='hello world')

app = flx.App(Example)
app.export('example.html', link=0)  # Export to single file

To actually show the app, use launch:

app.launch('browser')  # show it now in a browser
flx.run()  # enter the mainloop

Using widgets the Python way

In the above examples, we’ve used the “classic” way to build applications from basic components. Flexx provides a variety of layout widgets as well as leaf widgets (i.e. controls), see the list of widget classes.

Further, we’ve created high-level widgets by subclassing the flx.Widget class. These classes operate in JavaScript, because they are what we call JsComponent’s, more on that later. Effectively, we are able to show the widgets live inside the guide itself. However, if you are developing a desktop app, consider subclassing from PyWidget instead: this will make that your widgets operatate in Python instead of JavaScript. We talk more about this in the next page of the guide.

Using widgets the web way

An approach that might be more familiar for web developers, and which is inspired by frameworks such as React is to build custom widgets using html elements. If you’re used to Python and the below looks odd to you, don’t worry, you don’t need it:

from flexx import flx

class Example(flx.Widget):

    name = flx.StringProp('John Doe', settable=True)
    age =  flx.IntProp(22, settable=True)

    @flx.action
    def increase_age(self):
        self._mutate_age(self.age + 1)

    def _create_dom(self):
        # Use this method to create a root element for this widget.
        # If you just want a <div> you don't have to implement this.
        return flx.create_element('div')  # the default is <div>

    def _render_dom(self):
        # Use this to determine the content. This method may return a
        # string, a list of virtual nodes, or a single virtual node
        # (which must match the type produced in _create_dom()).
        return [flx.create_element('span', {},
                    'Hello', flx.create_element('b', {}, self.name), '! '),
                flx.create_element('span', {},
                    'I happen to know that your age is %i.' % self.age),
                flx.create_element('br'),
                flx.create_element('button', {'onclick': self.increase_age},
                    'Next year ...')
                ]
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The _render_dom() method is called from an implicit reaction. This means that when any properties that are accessed during this function change, the function is automatically called again. This thus provides a declerative way to define the appearance of a widget using HTML elements.

Above, the third argument in create_element() is a string, but this may also be a list of dicts (create_element() returns a dict).