Adding application Help and About dialogs
Put some finishing touches to your application

PyQt5 Tutorial Mozzarella Ashbadger

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In the previous parts we've added some basic UI elements, including menus and toolbars, and implemented basic loading & saving of HTML files to the browser view. Now, to complete the standard interface, we will add a Help menu.

Since our application is a web browser, it makes sense to show the help in the browser view. We have two options here: either include the help HTML with the application, and use our load HTML code from the previous tutorial. Or, load up a web page in the browser view.

Here we're doing the latter, redirecting the user to a web page (this tutorial!) but have a go at implementing loading a HTML file for custom offline help.

python
help_menu = self.menuBar().addMenu("&Help")

about_action = QAction( QIcon( os.path.join('icons','question.png') ), "About Mozarella Ashbadger", self)
about_action.setStatusTip("Find out more about Mozarella Ashbadger") # Hungry!
about_action.triggered.connect( self.about )
help_menu.addAction(about_action)

navigate_mozarella_action = QAction( QIcon( os.path.join('icons','lifebuoy.png') ), "Mozarella Ashbadger Homepage", self)
navigate_mozarella_action.setStatusTip("Go to Mozarella Ashbadger Homepage")
navigate_mozarella_action.triggered.connect( self.navigate_mozarella )
help_menu.addAction(navigate_mozarella_action)

Next we add two custom slot methods to handle the display of the dialog, and to load the 'browser page' with more information.

The first method navigate_mozzarella opens up a page with more information on the browser, the second creates and executes a custom QDialog class AboutDialog.

python
def navigate_mozarella(self):
    self.browser.setUrl( QUrl("https://www.pythonguis.com/courses/example-browser/") )

def about(self):
    dlg = AboutDialog()
    dlg.exec_()

The definition for the about dialog is given below. The structure follows that seen earlier, with a QDialogButtonBox and associated signals to handle user input, and a series of QLabels to display the application information and a logo.

The only trick here is adding all the elements to the layout, then iterate over them to set the alignment to the center in a single loop. This saves duplication for the individual sections.

python
class AboutDialog(QDialog):

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(AboutDialog, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

        QBtn = QDialogButtonBox.Ok  # No cancel
        self.buttonBox = QDialogButtonBox(QBtn)
        self.buttonBox.accepted.connect(self.accept)
        self.buttonBox.rejected.connect(self.reject)

        layout = QVBoxLayout()

        title = QLabel("Mozarella Ashbadger")
        font = title.font()
        font.setPointSize(20)
        title.setFont(font)

        layout.addWidget(title)

        logo = QLabel()
        logo.setPixmap( QPixmap( os.path.join('icons','ma-icon-128.png') ) )
        layout.addWidget(logo)

        layout.addWidget( QLabel("Version 23.35.211.233232") )
        layout.addWidget( QLabel("Copyright 2015 Mozarella Inc.") )

        for i in range(0, layout.count() ):
            layout.itemAt(i).setAlignment( Qt.AlignHCenter )

        layout.addWidget(self.buttonBox)

        self.setLayout(layout)

The completes the basic user interface for our web browser. In the next part we're going to take this functional web browser and extend it to implemented tabbed web browsing -- allowing you to keep multiple documents open at the same time.

Have other improvements you'd like to make? Then do! It's the best way to learn.

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Adding application Help and About dialogs was written by Martin Fitzpatrick .

Martin Fitzpatrick has been developing Python/Qt apps for 8 years. Building desktop applications to make data-analysis tools more user-friendly, Python was the obvious choice. Starting with Tk, later moving to wxWidgets and finally adopting PyQt.