Trying to use Tkinter to open dialog box in ArcMap

Question

The following script works great from the command line but crashes from the pythonaddin:

import Tkinter

import tkFileDialog
root = Tkinter.Tk()
root.withdraw()
pathtest = tkFileDialog.askopenfilename()
print pathtest

pathtest = pythonaddins.OpenDialog('Open Item', True) does not work for me because it suppresses filetypes that I need to see (pdf).

I know this is a duplicate question but I just joined the site and could not comment on other posts.

Answer 1

It is technically possible to use Tkinter in arcpy / python addins using multiprocessing, but this is quite complicated and not supported or recommended by ESRI. They recommend using C# instead of python for GUI development.

See this post and http://anothergisblog.blogspot.se/2013/07/python-add-ins-and-tkinter.html

Answer 2

You could try using native win32 dialogs. You'd need to have pywin32 installed first (pip installable version is pypiwin32), then you could do something like:

import win32ui
dlg = win32ui.CreateFileDialog(1, ".pdf", "Default File Name.pdf", 
                               0, "PDF Files (*.pdf)|*.pdf|All Files (*.*)|*.*|")
dlg.DoModal()
print dlg.GetPathName()
del dlg