Idle thread (Polling) python GUI and saving program state

[Rolando]

On Monday, March 3, 2014 6:06:22 PM UTC-8, MRAB wrote:
> On 2014-03-04 01:33, Rolando wrote:
> 
>  > I have a GUI with a bunch of cells which is my "View" in the MVC
> 
>  > design. The user enters some information in the view and I pass this
> 
>  > on to the model so that using the information entered by the user
> 
>  > it(model) can do some processing.
> 
>  >
> 
>  > I have coded up my model as a state machine. Wherein, once a function
> 
>  > is complete it switches to the next state and so on.
> 
>  >
> 
>  > I want to know how do I save the program state between restarts.
> 
>  > Basically, I'm trying to handle a scenario wherein if someone closes
> 
>  > the program. The next time someone starts it up, it should start from
> 
>  > where it left off (both the view and model)
> 
>  >
> 
> When the user closes the window (you don't say what you're using for
> 
> the GUI, but there should be a way of detecting when window closes),
> 
> save the necessary info to a file using, say, the 'json' module. You
> 
> can then reload the info from the file when the program is restarted.
> 
> 
> 
>  > Also, I want to setup a poll method where once in a while I can poll
> 
>  > each cell to know the state it is in. How do I do this? I don't want
> 
>  > my GUI to hang when I'm doing anything. It will be great if someone
> 
>  > could help. Thanks!
> 
>  >
> 
> Can the model run continuously? If so, you should run it in its own
> 
> (background) thread and the GUI in the main thread and communicate
> 
> with the model's thread via, say, a queue (for that use the 'queue'
> 
> module).

I'm using wxPython for my GUI. I have tried running the model thread in the background. But how will I save the state if the whole model is running on a thread? When the program is restarted I want the program to continue from the same state where it left off for each cell. I was thinking of having an idle thread that calls a poll method which polls all the cells and checks what each one is doing. But, I don't know how to do that. I'm confused.