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askopenfilename()

Christian Gollwitzer auriocus at gmx.de
Sat Nov 28 08:34:27 EST 2015 
Am 28.11.15 um 13:48 schrieb Ulli Horlacher:
> Christian Gollwitzer <auriocus at gmx.de> wrote:
>> Many problems would simply go away if you wrote the whole thing as a GUI
>> program.
>
> Too much hassle.
> The predecessor was a Perl/Tk program and I have had to invest 90% of the
> programming work into the GUI handling. No fun at all.

As I see it, the program consists only of user interface - or is there 
any "algorithm" working behinds the scenes? Maybe you could pass the 
task on to somebody who enjoys GUI programming?

> Now, with fexit in Python, I skipped most of these problems.
> The only GUI part is the file selection.
>
>
>> If I understand correctly, what you want - a program to select files and
>> folders to upload to your server
>
> This is only one of the tasks. The main menu looks:
>
> [s]  send a file or directory
> [g]  get a file
> [c]  change login data (user, server, auth-ID)
> [l]  login with webbrowser
> [u]  update fexit
> [h]  help
> [q]  quit

All of this is easily integrated into a GUI like the one I posted (have 
you tried it?), either as a button or as a menu entry. IMO the most 
common GUI pattern for this kind of thing is a side-by-side view of the 
directories on the server and on the client, and a button (or 
drag'n'drop) to move files between both views. I understand this is not 
as easy as the script posted by me - nonetheless quite doable. For an 
experienced GUI script writer it'll take a weekend to get the basics 
running.

> (with more features to come in the future)
>
> And the CLI:
>
> framstag at juhu:~: ./fexit.py -h
> usage: fexit [-C "comment"] [-a container] file(s) recipient[,...]
> example: fexit flupp.avi framstag at rus.uni-stuttgart.de
> example: fexit -C "more data" -a labdata *.png x1 at flupp.org,x2 at flupp.org
>
> usage: fexit FEX-download-URL
> example: fexit http://fex.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/fop/jHn34yp7/flupp.avi
>

This part should probably stay as it is. For a command line tool, an 
scp-like interface seems well-fitting. But for guided user input, an 
interface which prompts the user for input has never been a good 
solution. You have to work very hard to make that convenient. Have a 
look at lftp, for instance. In the end, real GUI programming will be 
easier (and more accessible)

A (still) alternative solution would be an interface to the OS to make 
it a remote mounted folder (works for WebDAV on any modern OS, for 
instance) or a daemon, which watches and synchronizes a directory (this 
is how Dropbox works). This way it feels much more integrated to the 
user - they can use whatever file manager they like to do the transfer, 
or even "save" from any application (like Word, Firefox, ...) into the 
remote folder.

	Christian
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