Exclude animation dock widget from viewer screenshot

[sofroniewn]

One thing that might be nice is to figure out how to exclude the animation dock widget from the viewer screenshot if it is not wanted. I guess the widget can always be undocked, but it is something we might want to consider

[alisterburt]

I guess the use case is for creating animations showing how to do things in the viewer/the effect of changing things in the viewer? Makes sense, will have a think

[alisterburt]

@katherine-hutchings @cormsby626 this would be a slightly more technical place to contribute which could be fun!

The whole dock widget will need to be hidden, not just the AnimationWidget which lives inside the dock widget - something like
viewer.window._dock_widgets['animation: Wizard'].hide()
viewer.window._dock_widgets['animation: Wizard'].show()
will get us going but it would be good to see if we can achieve this using the public API... maybe @tlambert03 or @DragaDoncila knows if there is a nice public API for hiding dock widgets?

As before, feel free to ping me any time if you choose to take this on, either here or on the napari zulip

[tlambert03]

maybe @tlambert03 or @DragaDoncila knows if there is a nice public API for hiding dock widgets?

nope, but I'd say it's ultimately the same request as napari/napari#2203 and napari/napari#3944 (which needs someone to love it)

[katherine-hutchings]

Hi Guys I had a go at implementing this in the way suggested, however it did not seem to work as expected.

Hiding the instance of QtViewerDockWidget from the integrated ipython console works as expected, but when this is called during the animate method the canvas does not resize itself to take up the extra space.

I tried to make a minimal example in napari, but could not reproduce so the issue must be something to do with napari-animation.

import napari
from magicgui import magicgui

viewer = napari.Viewer()

widget_name = 'widget'

@magicgui
def my_func():
    viewer.window._dock_widgets[widget_name].hide()


viewer.window.add_dock_widget(my_func, name=widget_name)
napari.run()

@tlambert03 @Czaki - @alisterburt mentioned you guys know a lot about Qt, is this something you immediately know the cause of?

[tlambert03]

yeah, hiding a specific dock widget will do just that: hide the dock widget. But what you really need to manipulate here is the QMainWindow instance itself... specifically, with removeDockWidget and restoreDockWidget. You could do this with a context manager

from contextlib import contextmanager

@contextmanager
def hidden_dock_widget(window: QMainWindow, widget: QDockWidget):
    window.removeDockWidget(widget)
    try:
        yield
    finally:
        window.restoreDockWidget(widget)

with hidden_dock_widget(viewer.window._qt_window, your_dock_widget):
    # render

[katherine-hutchings]

Thank you very much, I will look into this :)