Being Contributor for Hacktoberfest '23

Shamith Nakka — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 12:34:40 +0000

Intro

Hello , My name is Shamith and I have successfully completed my hacktoberfest challenge. Even though I am familiar with open-source contributions, my skills were not up to the mark to contribute to some big projects. But that didn't stop me from completing the hacktoberfest challenge.

iamwatchdogs (Shamith) · GitHub

iamwatchdogs has 47 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

github.com

Highs and Lows

I have faced many issues being a beginner and I want to help people understand open source contribution. So, that is why I have created a few repos that are very beginner-friendly yet good-quality projects for newbies that were like me at the beginning. And while creating those Repo, I made a few pull requests, thus completing my hacktoberfest challenge.

Growth

During this year's hacktoberfest, I was able to learn and understand how the Jekyll frameworks and how to build simple projects using them. Including to that, I got well at writing automation scripts using Python and creating a bit complex and reusable workflow for GitHub actions.

Facing issues while creating multiple instances of Dependent QComboBox

Shamith Nakka — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 16:07:09 +0000

I'm working on the GUI part of the input dock on the truss_connection_bolted module on a project called Osdag and the whole GUI part is written using the PyQt5 module. My task is to finish the connecting members attribute on the Input dock which happens to be a set of QComboBox widgets on a single QTableWidget. I have successfully written most of the part by there is one section of QComboBox in the Table widget that depends on another QComboBox.

After long research, I was able to create a stud that shows the required functionality. Here is the following code snippet for the stub.

# ---------------
# More Code above
# ---------------

# Table Widget Creation
table_widget = QtWidgets.QTableWidget(self.dockWidgetContents)
table_widget.setObjectName(option[0])
table_widget.setRowCount(8)
table_widget.setColumnCount(6)

# Attributes dictionary 
selectable_options = {
  'Section profile': ['Angle', 'Star Angles', 'Back to Back Angles', 'Channel','Back to Back Channels'],
  'Connection Location': {
    'Angle': ['Long leg connected', 'Short leg connected'],
    'Channel': ['Web-connected']
  },
  'Section Size': ['20 x 20 x 3', '20 x 20 x 4', '25 x 25 x 3', '25 x 25 x 4', ...],
  'Material': [ 'E165', 'E250 (Fe 410W) A', 'E250 (Fe 410W) B', 'E250 (Fe 410W) C', ....]
}

# Setting Head Labels to the table widget
table_widget.setHorizontalHeaderLabels(
  list(selectable_options.keys()) + ["Angle with x-axis (Degrees)", "Factored Load (KN)"]
)

# Creating two indivdual QComboBox for testing out the dependency functionality
combo_box_secpro = QtWidgets.QComboBox()
combo_box_connloc = QtWidgets.QComboBox()

# Adding values to the "Section Profile" QComboBox
for item in selectable_options['Section profile']:
  value = None
  if item in ['Angle', 'Star Angles', 'Back to Back Angles']:
    value = selectable_options['Connection Location']['Angle']
  elif item in ['Channel', 'Back to Back Channels']:
    value = selectable_options['Connection Location']['Channel']
combo_box_secpro.addItem(item, value)

# Connecting "Section Profile" QComboBox to "Connection Location" QComboBox
combo_box_secpro.activated.connect(
  lambda: combo_box_connloc.clear() or combo_box_connloc.addItems(
            selectable_options['Connection Location'][ 'Angle' if combo_box_secpro.currentText() in ['Angle', 'Star Angles', 'Back to Back Angles'] else 'Channel']
            )
  )

# Placing both of those the QComboBoxes into table Widget
table_widget.setCellWidget(0,0,combo_box_secpro)
table_widget.setCellWidget(0,1,combo_box_connloc)

# ---------------
# More code below
# ---------------

The above code snippet worked fine but, when I tried to loop the same logic... It's not working as Intended... The code snippet for the looping logic:

# ---------------------
# More other code above
# ---------------------

# Note that this is just a looped version of the above logic,
# so all the other declarations of the dictionary mentioned above are present here..

combo_box_dictionary = dict()  # Just in case, if we need the combo_box object for each option

for col, (key, value) in enumerate(selectable_options.items()):

  # Skipping 'Connection location' as I have handled it in 'Section profile'
  if key == 'Connection Location':
    continue

  # Creating 'Connection location' QComboBox that depend on 'Section profile' QComboBox
  elif key == 'Section profile':

    combo_box_section_profile_list = []
    combo_box_connection_location_list = []

    # Looping for 8 times for each row in table widget
    for row in range(8):

      # Creating QComboBox Object for both 'Section profile' & 'Connection location'
      combo_box_section_profile = QtWidgets.QComboBox()
      combo_box_connection_location = QtWidgets.QComboBox()

      # Adding items into 'Section profile' QComboBox
      for item in selectable_options['Section profile']:
        value = None
        if item in ['Angle', 'Star Angles', 'Back to Back Angles']:
          value = selectable_options['Connection Location']['Angle']
        elif item in ['Channel', 'Back to Back Channels']:
          value = selectable_options['Connection Location']['Channel']
        combo_box_section_profile.addItem(item, value)

      # Connecting 'Section profile' dependent functionality to 'Connection Location'
      combo_box_section_profile.activated.connect(
        lambda: combo_box_connection_location.clear() or combo_box_connection_location.addItems(
          selectable_options['Connection Location']['Angle' if combo_box_section_profile.currentText() in ['Angle', 'Star Angles', 'Back to Back Angles'] else 'Channel']
                 )
         )

      # Added Default Items into 'Connection Location'
      combo_box_connection_location.addItems(selectable_options['Connection Location']['Angle'])

      # Setting the QComboBoxes into their respective places
      table_widget.setCellWidget(row, col, combo_box_section_profile)
      table_widget.setCellWidget(row, col+1, combo_box_connection_location)

      # Storing their Object References per each row
      combo_box_section_profile_list.append(combo_box_section_profile)
      combo_box_connection_location_list.append(combo_box_connection_location)

    # Collectively storing Object References for both of them for all the rows
    combo_box_dictionary['Section profile'] = combo_box_section_profile_list
    combo_box_dictionary['Connection Location'] = combo_box_connection_location_list

  else:
    # Logic for adding simple QComboBoxes to the table widget
    combo_box_list = []
    for row in range(8):
      combo_box = QtWidgets.QComboBox()
      combo_box.addItems(value)
      table_widget.setCellWidget(row, col, combo_box)
      combo_box_list.append(combo_box)
      combo_box_dictionary[key] = combo_box_list

# ---------------------
# More other code below
# ---------------------

Output:

Note:

If you want to see the whole code you can find it within my GitHub in truss-connection-bolted-gui.

If you wish to setup the project within you system, make sure the following things;

Use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS version through your VM.

Follow the README.md instrustion to install the project environment.

And It's recommended to use Pycharm IDE.

I have spent a lot of time search for some answers but, could find one. Is there way to fix this problem ?

Other than my original implementation, I have tried searching for an alternative to the connecting method but couldn't find one...

Then I tried different approaches like storing the object references and then assigning the connecting method to link up the required functionality to the respective QComboBoxes. But, That didn't work out either...

for col, (key, value) in enumerate(selectable_options.items()):
  combo_box_list = []
  for row in range(8):
    combo_box = QtWidgets.QComboBox()
    if key == 'Connection Location':
      value = selectable_options['Connection Location']['Angle']
    combo_box.addItems(value)
    table_widget.setCellWidget(row, col, combo_box)
    combo_box_list.append(combo_box)
  combo_box_dictionary[key] = combo_box_list

for index, secpro_QComboBox in enumerate(combo_box_dictionary['Section profile']):
  connloc_QComboBox = combo_box_dictionary['Connection Location'][index]
  secpro_QComboBox.activated.connect(lambda:
    connloc_QComboBox.clear() or
    connloc_QComboBox.addItems(
      selectable_options['Connection Location']['Angle' if secpro_QComboBox.currentText() in ['Angle', 'Star Angles', 'Back to Back Angles'] else 'Channel']
     )
  )