Custom objects in ListStore/TreeStore

Question

I have a list L of objects of my class A. This class implements __str__/__repr__, so each object has it's own string representation (not necessary unique). I have a GUI in pygtk, where I have a TreeView widget with only one column. I want to populate it with string representations of the objects in L, but then I want to get selected items as objects, not as string. Is there a way to make TreeView to store list of objects, but display them as stings? If not, then what is the best way to know what objects are selected in the TreeView? The problem also is that depending on some conditions I can populate TreeView not with the whole L, but with some sublist of it, and so indexes of items in TreeView won't correspond to ones in L.

Answer 1

You could store the object in one column (gobject.TYPE_PYOBJECT) and the string representation in a second column, and then only display the second column in your treeview. Similar to what's done here: http://www.learningpython.com/2006/09/02/extending-our-pygtk-application/

Answer 2

If your Glade is 3.7.0 or newer you can type "PyObject" (without the quotes) as the column type for you ListStore. Then use set_cell_data_func to retrieve an object from the model and pass its representation to the CellRenderer as text. No string columns to synchronize and no indexes to worry about.