Quickstart

The very first thing we need to do is create our Tkinter application. This step does not require the use of our library yet.

Listing 1 Basic tkinter application - without Tkinter-Async-Execute

from tkinter import ttk
import tkinter as tk

class Application:
    def __init__(self):
        root = tk.Tk()
        ttk.Button(root, text="Click me", command=self.button_click_command, width=20).pack(padx=20)
        self.root = root

    def button_click_command(self):
        print("Button clicked")

    def run(self):
        self.root.mainloop()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = Application()
    app.run()

Fig. 1 The result of the above code.

Now let’s add our async functionality.

from tkinter import ttk
import tkinter as tk

import tk_async_execute as tae
import asyncio


class Application:
    def __init__(self):
        root = tk.Tk()
        ttk.Button(root, text="Click me", command=self.button_click_command, width=20).pack(padx=20)
        self.root = root

    async def button_click_async(self):
        print("Async function: button clicked")
        await asyncio.sleep(5)
        print("After sleep")

    def button_click_command(self):
        print("Button clicked")
        tae.async_execute(self.button_click_async(), wait=True, visible=False, pop_up=False)
        print("After async execute")


    def run(self):
        self.root.mainloop()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = Application()
    tae.start()
    app.run()
    tae.stop()

Fig. 2 The result of the above code.

In the above code, we have started the asyncio event loop with the tk_async_execute.start() function, added an async method and called that async method with the tk_async_execute.async_execute() function from the button command handler function. The async code was executed in a blocking mode, meaning that button_click_command waited for button_click_async to finish (wait=True), we chose to not show the execution window (visible=False) and decided to allow other interactions (eg. more button clicks) to occur while our async method was being executed (pop_up=False). At the end of our code, there is a call to the tk_async_execute.stop() function, which get’s called after we close our application window, the purpose of which is to stop the asyncio event loop running in the background.