How to set the briefcase program's preferences?

[yjlc-pc]

I can find 'preference' for the briefcase program,but I don't know how to set this.

[freakboy3742]

I presume you're asking about the Preferences menu item. That's currently a placeholder, provided to indicate that this is an area that we're intending to look at in the future. There isn't any public API to customise that menu item at present.

If you want to use this menu item, you'll need to modify the list of commands to delete the existing Preference menu item, and install your own.

PR #2244 has a prototype of an implementation that allows customisation of the Preferences menu item. It's likely that API, or something close to it, will land in the next couple of months.

[yjlc-pc]

Thank you.But how to delete the preference menu item?

[freakboy3742]

You need to search the existing app.commands definitions for the item that corresponds to the Preferences menu item, and delete that item from the set of commands.

[yjlc-pc]

How to search? Can you give me some command?

[mhsmith]

The app.commands documentation shows that it's a mutable set. You can iterate through it in a for loop, identify the preferences item by its text, then pass it to app.commands.remove.

[reefwing]

I'm assuming that you mean toga and not briefcase, if that is so then to do this for Settings... I used:

def startup(self):
        # Other startup stuff...
        
        # Get a reference to the Settings... command
        settings_command = next((cmd for cmd in self.commands if isinstance(cmd, toga.Command) and cmd.text == "Settings\u2026"), None)
        if settings_command is not None:
            settings_command.action = wrapped_handler(settings_command, self.action_settings)
            settings_command.enabled = True
            
def action_settings(self, widget):
    # Display settings window here
    pass

Not sure about preferences, I don't see an item for that on macOS running a toga app.

[freakboy3742]

The title of the Preferences item is platform dependent; the code you've provided here will work for macOS, but on other platforms the label will be different. However, this general approach will work, though.

[reefwing]

That makes sense. It's on my list of things to do to package up an app on all the other platforms, given BeeWare is all about cross platform!