Adding a scrollbar to a group of widgets in Tkinter

Question

I am using Python to parse entries from a log file, and display the entry contents using Tkinter and so far it\'s been excellent. The output is a grid of label widgets, but

Answer 1

Make it scrollable

Use this handy class to make scrollable the frame containing your widgets . Follow these steps:

1. create the frame
2. display it (pack, grid, etc)
3. make it scrollable
4. add widgets inside it
5. call the update() method

---

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import ttk

class Scrollable(tk.Frame):
    """
       Make a frame scrollable with scrollbar on the right.
       After adding or removing widgets to the scrollable frame, 
       call the update() method to refresh the scrollable area.
    """

    def __init__(self, frame, width=16):

        scrollbar = tk.Scrollbar(frame, width=width)
        scrollbar.pack(side=tk.RIGHT, fill=tk.Y, expand=False)

        self.canvas = tk.Canvas(frame, yscrollcommand=scrollbar.set)
        self.canvas.pack(side=tk.LEFT, fill=tk.BOTH, expand=True)

        scrollbar.config(command=self.canvas.yview)

        self.canvas.bind('', self.__fill_canvas)

        # base class initialization
        tk.Frame.__init__(self, frame)         

        # assign this obj (the inner frame) to the windows item of the canvas
        self.windows_item = self.canvas.create_window(0,0, window=self, anchor=tk.NW)


    def __fill_canvas(self, event):
        "Enlarge the windows item to the canvas width"

        canvas_width = event.width
        self.canvas.itemconfig(self.windows_item, width = canvas_width)        

    def update(self):
        "Update the canvas and the scrollregion"

        self.update_idletasks()
        self.canvas.config(scrollregion=self.canvas.bbox(self.windows_item))

---

Usage example

root = tk.Tk()

header = ttk.Frame(root)
body = ttk.Frame(root)
footer = ttk.Frame(root)
header.pack()
body.pack()
footer.pack()

ttk.Label(header, text="The header").pack()
ttk.Label(footer, text="The Footer").pack()


scrollable_body = Scrollable(body, width=32)

for i in range(30):
    ttk.Button(scrollable_body, text="I'm a button in the scrollable frame").grid()

scrollable_body.update()

root.mainloop()