MVP Introduction

The MVP (Model, View, Presenter) pattern is a set of guidelines for creating easy to maintain GUIs (graphical user interfaces). In general:

• The view contains the ‘look’ of the GUI

• The model does the ‘hard sums’ for the GUI (e.g. runs algorithms)

• The presenter acts as a go between for the view and model

It is important to note that the view should be simple (no logic) and is usually not tested. The model can be tested in a similar way to other Python tests. The model and view never communicate with each other directly. The presenter will extract relevant information from the view and pass it to the model. The presenter may then pass the result of the model to the view. The presenter will contain the GUI logic and is tested using mocking.

These are guidelines and do not form a set of rules. It is sometimes open to interpretation if some files are classed as a view or a model (this will be discussed in detail later).

A more thorough explanation of MVP can be found at MVP (Model View Presenter).

This tutorial requires the packages qtpy, pyqt5, numpy and matplotlib to be installed in your python environment.