Select a file or a folder in QFileDialog pyqt5

Question

My scrip ist currently using QtWidgets.QFileDialog.getOpenFileNames() to let the user select files within Windows explorer. Now I´m wondering if there is a way to let them select also folders, not just files. There are some similar posts, but none of them provides a working solution. I really dont want to use the QFileDialog file explorer to get around this.

Answer 1

QFileDialog doesn't allow that natively. The only solution is to create your own instance, do some small "patching".

Note that in order to achieve this, you cannot use the native dialogs of your OS, as Qt has almost no control over them; that's the reason of the dialog.DontUseNativeDialog flag, which is mandatory.

The following code works as much as static methods do, and returns the selected items (or none, if the dialog is cancelled).

def getOpenFilesAndDirs(parent=None, caption='', directory='', 
                        filter='', initialFilter='', options=None):
    def updateText():
        # update the contents of the line edit widget with the selected files
        selected = []
        for index in view.selectionModel().selectedRows():
            selected.append('"{}"'.format(index.data()))
        lineEdit.setText(' '.join(selected))

    dialog = QtWidgets.QFileDialog(parent, windowTitle=caption)
    dialog.setFileMode(dialog.ExistingFiles)
    if options:
        dialog.setOptions(options)
    dialog.setOption(dialog.DontUseNativeDialog, True)
    if directory:
        dialog.setDirectory(directory)
    if filter:
        dialog.setNameFilter(filter)
        if initialFilter:
            dialog.selectNameFilter(initialFilter)

    # by default, if a directory is opened in file listing mode, 
    # QFileDialog.accept() shows the contents of that directory, but we 
    # need to be able to "open" directories as we can do with files, so we 
    # just override accept() with the default QDialog implementation which 
    # will just return exec_()
    dialog.accept = lambda: QtWidgets.QDialog.accept(dialog)

    # there are many item views in a non-native dialog, but the ones displaying 
    # the actual contents are created inside a QStackedWidget; they are a 
    # QTreeView and a QListView, and the tree is only used when the 
    # viewMode is set to QFileDialog.Details, which is not this case
    stackedWidget = dialog.findChild(QtWidgets.QStackedWidget)
    view = stackedWidget.findChild(QtWidgets.QListView)
    view.selectionModel().selectionChanged.connect(updateText)

    lineEdit = dialog.findChild(QtWidgets.QLineEdit)
    # clear the line edit contents whenever the current directory changes
    dialog.directoryEntered.connect(lambda: lineEdit.setText(''))

    dialog.exec_()
    return dialog.selectedFiles()