Widgets not showing up in Tkinter GUI

Question

I created code in order to display a 3x3 grid of buttons for a Tic-Tac-Toe program i'm developing. The grid worked before but when i tried to put the code into a class i just get a blank screen when i try to run the program. This is my code:

from tkinter import *

buttons = {".!frame.!button": 0,
           ".!frame.!button2": 1,
           ".!frame.!button3": 2,
           ".!frame.!button4": 3,
           ".!frame.!button5": 4,
           ".!frame.!button6": 5,
           ".!frame.!button7": 6,
           ".!frame.!button8": 7,
           ".!frame.!button9": 8,
           }

class GameBoard:

    def __init__(self, master):
        self.field = Frame(master)
        self.field.grid

        self.b1 = Button(self.field, text="-")
        self.b1.bind("<Button-1>", self.setfield)
        self.b1.grid(row=0, column=0)

        self.b2 = Button(self.field, text="-")
        self.b2.bind("<Button-1>", self.setfield)
        self.b2.grid(row=0, column=1)

        self.b3 = Button(self.field, text="-")
        self.b3.bind("<Button-1>", self.setfield)
        self.b3.grid(row=0, column=2)

        self.b4 = Button(self.field, text="-")
        self.b4.bind("<Button-1>", self.setfield)
        self.b4.grid(row=1, column=0)

        self.b5 = Button(self.field, text="-")
        self.b5.bind("<Button-1>", self.setfield)
        self.b5.grid(row=1, column=1)

        self.b6 = Button(self.field, text="-")
        self.b6.bind("<Button-1>", self.setfield)
        self.b6.grid(row=1, column=2)

        self.b7 = Button(self.field, text="-")
        self.b7.bind("<Button-1>", self.setfield)
        self.b7.grid(row=2, column=0)

        self.b8 = Button(self.field, text="-")
        self.b8.bind("<Button-1>", self.setfield)
        self.b8.grid(row=2, column=1)

        self.b9 = Button(self.field, text="-")
        self.b9.bind("<Button-1>", self.setfield)
        self.b9.grid(row=2, column=2)

    def setfield(self, event):
        print(buttons[str(event.widget)])



root = Tk()

board = GameBoard(root)

root.mainloop()

Could someone help me find out why i just get an empty frame when i run the program?

Answer 1

Could someone help me find out why i just get an empty frame when i run the program?

It is because you aren't adding it to the window. Consider this code:

self.field.grid

It does absolutely nothing. For the window to appear you must call the function:

self.field.grid()

In my opinion a class should never call grid or pack or place on itself. That should be the job of the caller. It's a good habit to get in because it promotes code reuse.

Personally I would remove that line and change a couple of the last lines to this:

board = GameBoard(root)
board.grid() # or board.pack(...)

---

You are making way too much work for yourself. You can pass arguments to the callback. For example:

self.b1 = Button(self.field, text="-", command=lambda: setfield(1))

With that, your callback will be called with the parameter 1 , and you won't need to do any sort of lookup.