Should ValueElement be Generic[V] ?

[petergaultney]

NiceGUI has the concept of a ValueElement, which contains a value attribute (Bindable Property) that can be set and retrieved.

For the subset of these that I've taken a look at, they have a 'correct' type of the value. For instance, Input has value: str, whereas number has value: float

At the moment, the code types these as Any because the parent mixin (ValueElement) is not represented as Generic. But it seems like that would be possible, and not too hard to do? And then we could change to set_value(value: V) (instead of Any), and more NiceGUI-using code could take advantage of types.

[falkoschindler]

Hi @petergaultney, that's a great idea! It always feels a bit odd that the value can be of Any type.

It's hard to foresee all consequences though. E.g. there's the ValueChangeEventArguments class which cnsequently should also be generic. But we can start with the ValueElement, let mypy and pylint guide our way and see how it goes.

Would you like to give it a go? 🙂

[petergaultney]

let's see how my other PR goes (builder pattern for event handlers), and then I will give this one a try.

I agree that there are some unpredictable consequences of trying to refactor types at this scale. :) Of course, for some users it may also start causing them static typing errors if we improve this - but for those who use static typing, I think they will mostly be grateful even if there is some refactoring they need to do.

[jermatic]

theres a big shift in python 3.12 where generics become first class citizens so..... id just keep that in mind when moving forward

[evnchn]

Got it working in #5785