Creating Tkinter dialog box in arcpy?

Question

I would like to create a dialog box which pops up when the user click on a button from a Python Add-In toolbar.

The user will navigate to their preferred file and select any shapefiles they wish to add to ArcMap.

I found this code:

 import Tkinter, tkFileDialog
 root = Tkinter.Tk()
 root.withdraw()
 file_path = tkFileDialog.askopenfile()

but the dialog box is ALMOST opening and then ArcMap crashes.

• Jason Scheirer: Use PyQT instead
• Toronto23: I am not familiar with PyQT. Is that another programming language?
• Jason Scheirer: It's another graphics library

Answer 1

Since you're using a python addin, you could use the pythonaddins.OpenDialog method. Slightly modified example based on the documentation:

This add-in button uses OpenDialog() to select a set of layer files and adds each layer to the selected data frame.

import arcpy
import pythonaddins
class AddLayers(object):
 def __init__(self):
 self.enabled = True
 self.checked = False
 def onClick(self):
 layer_files = pythonaddins.OpenDialog('Select Layers', True, r'C:\GISData', 'Add')
 mxd = arcpy.mapping.MapDocument('current')
 df = mxd.activeDataFrame
 for dataset in datasets:
 layer = arcpy.mapping.Layer(dataset)
 arcpy.mapping.AddLayer(df, layer)