Can a GTK File Chooser Dialog be part of a window?

Question

File chooser dialogs look like this:

But is it possible to have a fullscreen window and have this take up, say, half of that window instead of being its own window?

Answer 1

You can use GtkFileChooserWidget (Gtkmm 2.24).

It's the basic widget that GtkFileChooserDialog uses. As the description says:

GtkFileChooserWidget is a widget suitable for selecting files. It is the main building block of a GtkFileChooserDialog. Most applications will only need to use the latter; you can use GtkFileChooserWidget as part of a larger window if you have special needs.

Note that GtkFileChooserWidget does not have any methods of its own. Instead, you should use the functions that work on a GtkFileChooser.

Answer 2

Note that if what you want to add to the FileChooserDialog isn't too complicated, you could consider adding the extra functionality to the dialog itself, instead of creating a new window (with all the bureaucracy involved).

You can access the top part of the dialog (above the Ok/Cancel buttons) by calling get_content_area (). You'll get a reference to a VBox, to which you can then add more items, such as load or save options, formats, etc.

Here's a very simple example which adds a check button to the dialog:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#
#  test_filechooser_extension.py
#
#  Copyright 2017 John Coppens <john@jcoppens.com>
#
#  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
#  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
#  (at your option) any later version.
#
#  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#  GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#  along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
#  Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston,
#  MA 02110-1301, USA.
#
#


from gi.repository import Gtk

class MainWindow(Gtk.Window):
    def __init__(self):
        super(MainWindow, self).__init__()
        self.connect("destroy", lambda x: Gtk.main_quit())

        btn = Gtk.Button("Click to activate file chooser")
        btn.connect("clicked", self.button_clicked)

        self.add(btn)
        self.show_all()

    def run(self):
        Gtk.main()

    def button_clicked(self, btn):
        fc = Gtk.FileChooserDialog(
                    parent = self,
                    action = Gtk.FileChooserAction.OPEN,
                    buttons = ("Open", Gtk.ResponseType.OK,
                               "Cancel", Gtk.ResponseType.CANCEL))
        area = fc.get_content_area()
        option = Gtk.CheckButton("This could be an extra option")
        area.pack_start(option, False, False, 0)
        option.show()

        fc.run()
        fc.destroy()


def main(args):
    mainwdw = MainWindow()
    mainwdw.run()

    return 0

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys
    sys.exit(main(sys.argv))

Note that it is necessary to add .show() to the added widgets.