QTreeWidget from list of path like strings

I was about to code something up as a one off (and probably still wise for me to start there) but then I thought it might be ultimately a nice re-usable piece of Qt code we’d want to provide to plugin devs. I have a list of paths (they happen to come from inside a zip file from a url, but really they could also come from anywhere) - a small snapshot looks like

['RxRx19a/',
 'RxRx19a/LICENSE',
 'RxRx19a/images/',
 'RxRx19a/images/VERO-1/',
 'RxRx19a/images/VERO-1/Plate1/',
 'RxRx19a/images/VERO-1/Plate1/AC41_s4_w3.png',
 'RxRx19a/images/VERO-1/Plate1/G38_s3_w1.png',....]

and I’d like to use a QTreeWidget to browse them as described in posts like this one on stackoverflow.

When i select a path with a png I’d then like to trigger some calls that will lead to a new image being displayed in the viewer - i.e. turning napari into a little file browser for this remote zip. It might also be nice to have similar browser capability for local files too.

Curious what you think of this @tlambert03 or if you have any tips before I got going? I’d say this is more of a hobby use of napari rather than a top development priority, but always fun to be trying to push it in new ways 😃

[sofroniewn]

Following up I made a new cool demo doing a similar thing but with my local file browser.

Clears and loads new image data via viewer.open_path / viewer.open when selected. Makes for fun browsing!!! Should probably remove the open/ cancel buttons

import os
from qtpy.QtWidgets import QFileDialog
from qtpy.QtCore import Qt


file_dialog = QFileDialog()
file_dialog.setWindowFlags(Qt.Widget)
file_dialog.setModal(False)
file_dialog.setOption(QFileDialog.DontUseNativeDialog)


def open_path(path):
    if os.path.isfile(path):
        viewer.layers.select_all()
        viewer.layers.remove_selected()
        viewer.open_path(path)
        

file_dialog.currentChanged.connect(open_path)

[jni]

@JacksonMaxfield this is a different use case I think. Both a file browser and a world browser can live side by side in the napari plugin ecosystem. 😊 In the case of magicgui, I think we mostly want to support standard or quasi-standard widgets. Note that above the whole thing is a QFileDialog, so we can’t really go in and move things around.