How to invoke method on GUI thread but without have that method in QMainWindow class Pyqt

Question

I have made the simply logging of crashes (unhandled exceptions): At start you simple call CrashEngine.register("sw", "1.1.7") from main thread.

import sys
import time
import os
import traceback
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import *

class CrashEngine:
    @staticmethod
    def register(name, version):
        CrashEngine.name = name
        CrashEngine.version = version
        sys.excepthook = CrashEngine.__logCrash

    @staticmethod
    def __logCrash(exc_type, exc_value, exc_traceback):
        crash = "".join(traceback.format_exception(exc_type, exc_value, exc_traceback))
        with open("crash.log", "w") as f:
            f.write(time.ctime() + "\n")
            f.write("Software name: " + CrashEngine.name + "\n")
            f.write("Software version: " + CrashEngine.version + "\n")
            f.write("\n")
            f.write(crash)

        CrashEngine.__showDialog()

    @staticmethod
    def __showDialog():
        message = ("Fatal error occurred and application will be terminated.\n\n"
                   "Crash log was created at:\n" +
                    os.getcwd() + "\crash.log.\n\n"
                   "Please send log to ***@***.com")
        msg = QMessageBox(QMessageBox.Critical, "Application Crashed", message)
        msg.exec()
        quit(1)

Everything worked excellent until i have meet multithreaded app where is sys.excepthook raised sometimes from different thread than main thread. As we know Calling GUI from different threads will result in unexpected behavior and crash in most of time.

The only thing i know is create slot in QMainWindow and create Signal in CrashEngine and connect them. But this is what I don't want to because CrashEngine is used in so many scripts, programs, etc and I don't want to add same piece of code (showing MsgBox) in all of them.

UPDATE: I reworked code according to @three_pineapples suggestion but via PyQt framework instead of pure Python.

@staticmethod
def __showDialog():
    path = sys.executable
    arg = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)) + "\\show_crash.py"
    QProcess.startDetached(path, [arg])
    sys.exit(1)

and show_crash.py contains:

import sys
import os
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import *


class ErrorWindow(QMessageBox):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()

        self.setWindowTitle("Application Crashed")
        message = ("Fatal error occurred and application was terminated.\n\n"
                   "Crash log was created at:\n" +
                   os.getcwd() + "\crash.log.\n\n"
                   "Please send log to ***@***.com")
        self.setText(message)
        self.setIcon(QMessageBox.Critical)
        self.show()


def main():
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)
    ex = ErrorWindow()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())


main()

Answer 1

It is possible to handle this by posting using the signal/slot approach as you suggest (but would like to avoid) or by posting a custom event back to the Qt event loop via QApplication.instance().postEvent() both of these methods are fundamentally flawed because they rely on the Qt event loop functioning correctly (which may not be the case if part of your application has entered an error state).

The only reliable way to show an exception in a graphical message box is to have your exception handler launch a new process that creates the message box. It's reasonably easy to write a standalone application that shows sys.argv[1] in the message box, and to launch that using subprocess.Popen from your excepthook handler.

My colleagues and I have done this for a large Qt project, and it works very well. We've also gone to the effort of launching the message box using Tkinter (which ships by default with almost every Python install) rather than Qt, just in case the exception is caused by a missing or broken installation of Qt. It's open-sourced here.