OWFileBrowser widget

[ngergihun]

We wanted to have a quick and easy way to browse through lots of measurements quickly. To achieve we implemented a new widget that has a treeview-based file selection enabling much easier file browsing and loading. We think this it is a useful addition that makes the life of an end user easier and also enables the use of this widget in standalone apps.

[borondics]

Thanks for this! I think it will be nice.

[markotoplak]

This has no domain-connected settings and therefore should not have a context handler.

[markotoplak]

Is this supposed to save the last selected file? I think it should save it a a schema_only settings.

[ngergihun]

No, but maybe the sheet could be saved. Is it with: sheet = Setting(None, schema_only=True) ?

[markotoplak]

The last loaded file path should also be saved. Ideally, a RecentPath object is used for that setting. To keep the widget the as similar as OWFile, a list of RecentPath's with just one element could be used.

RecentPath already includes the reader and sheet setting.

[ngergihun]

Okay, I'll make the changes to use RecentPath

[markotoplak]

On my Linux with Qt 6.8.1 I get:

File "/home/marko/dev/orange-spectroscopy/orangecontrib/spectroscopy/widgets/owfilebrowser.py", line 8, in <module>
    from AnyQt.QtWidgets import (
ImportError: cannot import name 'QFileSystemModel' from 'AnyQt.QtWidgets' (/home/marko/venv312/lib/python3.12/site-packages/AnyQt/QtWidgets.py)

I added a commit that fixes the issue.

[markotoplak]

General comments:

• File type chooser should go under the file pickler.
• Opening on click is a strong operation. Choosing a file should not make anything time consuming run by default. I'd add a checkbox where this can be enabled / disabled. By default it should be double-click.
• How does this work on Windows where there are also different drives (C:, D:)?
• Pathname display on Linux is wrong (I guess also on Macs). For me, it shows double slashes "/ /" for the start. (I do like how well does it interact though)

[markotoplak]

Here I see many functions from OWFile copied and maybe slightly edited. This makes code review needlessly hard.

I therefore suggest this widget is redone as a OWFile subclass so that there is no need to copy the shared function. For now, at least. This will also bring in all recent_path functionality.

[ngergihun]

@markotoplak, thx for the suggestions. I'll work on a new version and come back with that for review.

[stuart-cls]

Very interesting! Am I supposed to be able to select multiple datasets?

The string filtering does not work for me (but I like the idea).

I do have to ask, at what point do we have too many dataset widgets? We already have 6 (File, CSV, Datasets, SQL, Multi-File, TileFile). Perhaps this would be a better fit for orange-spectroscopy-prototypes while we test out how the functionality works with real usage?

enables the use of this widget in standalone apps

What do you mean by this?

Edit: I forgot my TileFile widget, that makes 6!

[borondics]

Selecting multiple datasets would be nice, but then it opens a bit of a can of worms because we would need to check for dataset sizes to be consistent...

I have the same idea about having too many File readers. Not sure how to resolve this well. :( Any ideas would be great.

[ngergihun]

Hi @markotoplak ! I started the rewrite of the widget by subclassing OWFile. I try to reduce the code as much as possible, but I still need to reimplement some functions a bit differently due to the different components and interactions with the widget.

Also, when subclassing I get a warning, saying:
RuntimeWarning: subclassing of widget classes is deprecated and will be disabled in the future.
Extract code from OWFile or explicitly open it by adding openclass=True to class definition.
class OWFileBrowser(OWFile):

Also, OWFile has UI elements that we don't have and most of its functions refer to them, I have to create 'dummy' UI elements with the same name that's makes a bit of a mess.

If it is okay with the mentioned limitations, then I can continue.

[stuart-cls]

I had the same problem with TileFile. I think in that widget I just ended up putting in a code-copy which is not great.

Really we need this: biolab/orange3#5376

[ngergihun]

@stuart-cls, yes, I came across your OWTileFile when I was looking for inspiration and suspected that you copy-modified some of the code for this reason.

[borondics]

Guys, what should we do with this widget? I mean we need to release it in the coming weeks but the question is what is the best way for now?

Subclass or not?

@markotoplak and @stuart-cls could you please comment (or help) how to fix the outstanding issues?

Thanks in advance!

[markotoplak]

Please make it a subclass for now. For ease of the review, mainly. Even though Orange is warning against it.