Mastering GUI Programming with Python

Delayed actions with QTimer

Being able to delay action in a program is useful in a variety of situations. For example, let's say that we want a modeless pop-up dialog that closes itself after a defined number of seconds rather than waiting for a user to click on a button.

We will start by subclassing QDialog:

class AutoCloseDialog(qtw.QDialog):    def __init__(self, parent, title, message, timeout):        super().__init__(parent)        self.setModal(False)        self.setWindowTitle(title)        self.setLayout(qtw.QVBoxLayout())        self.layout().addWidget(qtw.QLabel(message))        self.timeout = timeout

Having saved a timeout value, we now want to override the dialog box's show() method so that it closes after that number of seconds.

A naive approach might be as follows: