# Using Widgets

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Abstract

This chapter gives an overview of the specialized widgets in pyFormex and how to use them to quickly create a specialized graphical interface for you application.

The pyFormex Graphical User Interface (GUI) is built on the QT4 toolkit, accessed from Python by PyQt4. Since the user has full access to all underlying libraries, he can use any part from QT4 to construct the most sophisticated user interface and change the pyFormex GUI like he wants and sees fit. However, properly programming a user interface is a difficult and tedious task, and many normal users do not have the knowledge or time to do this. pyFormex provides a simplified framework to access the QT4 tools in a way that complex and sophisticated user dialogs can be built with a minimum effort. User dialogs are create automatically from a very limited input. Specialized input widgets are included dependent on the type of input asked from the user. And when this simplified framework falls short for your needs, you can always access the QT4 functions directly to add what you want.

## The askItems functions

The `askItems()` function reduces the effort needed to create an interactive dialog asking input data from the user.

## The input dialog

## The user menu

## Other widgets