wxPython ListBox PopupMenu

I've been working on my TV Emulator project in Python for a few months now. For one of my windows I use a listbox and I wanted to create a popup menu. I've created plenty of popup menus with TreeCtrl's. It's easy enough, we've got a handy right click event which you can grab the position from. For listbox? No such luck.

If you google this issue you're likely to see many people say "Use a listctrl!" That's a perfectly valid answer, creating a popup menu is easy with a listctrl, but a listctrl is a more complex object and might be overkill for your needs. There's got to be a way to use a popup menu on a listbox, right? Right! Let's get to it.

So, we can use the wx.ContextMenuEvent to fire a function when you right click the listbox, this event can be bound to a listbox with wx.EVT_CONTEXT_MENU, below is a test application I put together to show what happens when you try to grab the position from a ContextMenuEvent. (Hint: It doesn't work! See the screenshot below.)

#! /usr/bin/python

import wx
import wx.lib.agw.aui as aui

class myFrame(wx.Frame):
    def __init__(self,parent,ID,title,position,size):
        wx.Frame.__init__(self,parent,ID,title,position,size)
        self.listbox = wx.ListBox(choices=[],id=-1,parent=self,style=wx.LB_EXTENDED)
        self.mgr = aui.AuiManager(self)
        self.mgr.AddPane(self.listbox, aui.AuiPaneInfo().Center())
        for i in xrange(10):
            self.listbox.Insert(str(i),0,None)
        self.mgr.Update()
        self.listbox.Bind(wx.EVT_CONTEXT_MENU,self.showPopupMenu)
        self.createMenu()
        self.Centre()
        
    def createMenu(self):
        self.menu = wx.Menu()
        item1 = self.menu.Append(-1,'Item 1')
        item2 = self.menu.Append(-1,'Item 2')
        
    def showPopupMenu(self,evt):
        position = evt.GetPosition()
        self.PopupMenu(self.menu,position)

class WXApp(wx.App):
    def OnInit(self):
        frame = myFrame(None,-1,'Test App',wx.DefaultPosition,wx.Size(680,550))
        frame.Show(True)
        self.SetTopWindow(frame)
        return True

def main():
    wxobj = WXApp(False)
    wxobj.MainLoop()

main()  

Notice the popup menu shows up far off the point where the mouse clicked!

So obviously this doesn't work correctly as is, right? Well, there's a way around this. We can keep the contextmenu event, or we can use the right button up event, either works. The point is we need an event that fires when the right mouse button is clicked on the listbox. The problem is that we can't depend on the event for popup menu positioning because it isn't giving a position relative to your frame. But this information is accessible from wx. See below for a modified showPopupMenu function. (All other code is the same.)

    def showPopupMenu(self,evt):
        position = self.ScreenToClient(wx.GetMousePosition())
        self.PopupMenu(self.menu,position)

This looks better! The popup menu now appears where the mouse is located at click time.

With the above modification we're now grabbing the mouse's position directly from wx and then getting a position that's relative to the frame. With this position we can now accurately show a popup menu! I hope this helps someone.