Mastering Perl/Tk

The bindtags Command

So, we know that a Button has a predefined binding for a <ButtonRelease-1> event. What do you suppose will happen if we make an instance binding to <ButtonRelease-1> as well? Which callback gets invoked, the class or the instance? Or are both invoked? If both callbacks are invoked, in what order do they occur?

Both callbacks are invoked: first the class, then the instance. To understand why, we need to study the bindtags command. Whenever a binding is created, it is always associated with an identifying tag. Thus far, each of our Button binding examples has used two tags, a class name and a widget instance, which represent the Button’s class tag and the instance tag, respectively. Except for Toplevels, every widget has two additional binding tags: the widget’s Toplevel window and the global string all. Toplevels are their own instances, so they have only three binding tags.

When an event occurs, it’s compared against all the event descriptors for every tag that a widget owns, and if the event matches one of the tag’s list of event descriptors, the associated callback is executed. The search continues through the bindtags list until all the tags have been examined and every possible callback executed.

A widget’s bindtags list is ordered. It is always searched from left to right (starting at array index 0). The bindtags command queries, adds, deletes, or rearranges a widget’s binding tags list.

Let’s do a bindtags query command on our $twice button from the previous ...