Introduction
Formation studio is a tool that makes developing User interfaces in python a breeze. It allows developers
to focus on product functionality by doing the heavy lifting in terms of writing the interface code.
Using a set of powerful tools, developers can quickly design interfaces, save them as
XML files
and load them into their code. Formation studio draws inspiration from other
RAD tools such as
Android Studio's visual layout editor,
PAGE. The XML format used is largely similar to one used by
android layout files. It currently support both tkinter and it's ttk extension.
Getting started
Installation
To use formation studio you will need to have installed python version 3.6 or higher. You can download and install python from here .Proceed then and install formation using pip
Note: for some linux distributions you will need to have installed pip separately, follow these instructions)
pip install formation-studioif you have multiple python versions installed, to install for say python 3.7, use its pip tool
pip3.7 install formation-studioLaunching
After a successful installation you can launch the studio from the command line using the command
formation-studioThe studio will open with a blank design as shown below
You can select widgets from the Components pane at the top and drag them onto the stage. Click to
select widgets on the workspace and customize them on Stylepane to the right. You can view
your widget hierarchies from the Component tree at the bottom left.
To preview the the design, use the preview ("run button") on the toolbar.
After you are satisfied with the design, save by heading to the menubar File > Save.
Below is a sample studio preview saved as hello.xml
The underlying xml uses namespaces and is as shown below:
<tkinter.Frame
xmlns:attr="http://www.hoversetformationstudio.com/styles/"
xmlns:layout="http://www.hoversetformationstudio.com/layouts/"
name="Frame_1"
attr:layout="FrameLayout"
layout:width="616"
layout:height="287"
layout:x="33"
layout:y="33">
<tkinter.ttk.Label
name="myLabel"
attr:foreground="#44c33c"
attr:font="{Calibri} 20 {}"
attr:anchor="center" attr:text="Hello World!"
layout:width="539"
layout:height="89"
layout:x="41"
layout:y="41"/>
<tkinter.ttk.Button
name="myButton"
attr:text="Click me"
layout:width="95"
layout:height="30"
layout:x="266"
layout:y="204"/>
</tkinter.Frame>
Note: this xml file has been manually formated to make it more legible but the actual xml file is minimally formatted since it's not expected that the developer will need to modify the xml file manually
To load the design in your python code is as simple as:
# import the formation library which loads the design for you
from formation import AppBuilder
app = AppBuilder(path="hello.xml")
print(app.myLabel["text"]) # outputs text in the label 'Hello world!'
print(app.myButton["text"]) # outputs text in the button 'Click me'
app.mainloop()Note: Its advisable that you use widget names that are valid python identifiers to avoid possible issues while use the dot syntax to access the widget from the builder object. Use the widgets exact name as specified in the design to avoid
AttributeError
For more details checkout the documentation For those wishing to contribute, see the studio notes for developers and contributors Some good documentation for building python user interfaces include:
