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I have developed a program using curses, everything is cool so far but I was wondering myself if there is a good pattern to split different views/panels of my program into smaller chunks callable by my main loop?

Further informations:

This program is a rather small automation tool/wizard aiming to ease our application for customers requiring the on-premise installation.

This wizard is a 3 steps one and it’s used to grab informations from our customer installation needs depending of it’s chosen architecture.

The first step is requesting the customer to give us its identification informations such has contract number, company name, licence number and preferred contact.

The second step is requesting the customer to give us informations about either he want a standalone installation (All-In-One install) or a N-Tiers installation plus the required informations like the requested custom SSL VHostName or Tiers IP/Credentials.

The third and final step is showing the customer a progress bar and informations of the required services (MySQL/HTTPd/HAProxy/PHP-FPM) and our application.

I know that I do not especially need to use curses library for such a program but our UX Team requested it as it is part of our customer experience with the solution.

Dr I
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  • That would depend entirely on the nature of the program, which we can't judge since you haven't included much information. – Carcigenicate Jun 16 '16 at 16:38
  • Ok, this program is a relatively short wizard asking our customers for informations about the way they want us to install our application. I basically ask them if they want a standalone install or a N-tiers one. On N-tiers choice I then ask for tiers username/pwd/IP(or fqdn) of the host. Once all those informations grabbed I then install required services and finally our app. The final assistant views show the installer progress. – Dr I Jun 16 '16 at 16:43
  • 1. Edit that information into the original question. 2. It doesn't sound like you even need curses in the first place, except for 3. You could use a separate window to show a progress bar, with the main window showing the actual files being installed. That would just be gravy though; a progress bar wouldn't be required if you're otherwise outputting the progress. – Carcigenicate Jun 16 '16 at 16:57
  • Just updated the original question to add insight as requested. Indeed the curses requirement is not on my side to choose and so have to use it. I just look for a good modular pattern if existing at all ^^ I thought about using this wizard experiment to build installer factory indeed. – Dr I Jun 16 '16 at 17:32

2 Answers2

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You can look at the Forms library. It's a nice extension to ncurses that allows you to better manage input forms like yours. It offers a simple function interface to read the fields, change their properties, etc., as well as many different field types (including regexp-validated fields). In your case, you can simply create three forms, and post/unpost them in succession.

Anonymous1847
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  • While this link may answer the question, it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference. Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes. – Matthew Verstraete Dec 20 '16 at 20:27
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as such way to do things is not really usual, do not expect any framework to be available (like those available for WebUI for instance).

I so decided to create my own "Framework/factory" and so to be able to split every aspect of my app in a logic that would be similar of those used by web applications.

The source-code is dirty and really not pythonic, but it is well working so far and quite easy to maintain.

Thanks everyone for your answers and ideas.

Dr I
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