Toggle all checkboxes with ipywidgets?

Question

I'm using ipywidgets' checkboxes to interactively select data to be plotted.

It seems there is no "toggle all" functionality out of the box.

So I implemented my own "toggle all" like this:

import ipywidgets as widgets
def toggle_all(change):
    for cb in checkboxes[1:]:
        cb.value = checkboxes[0].value

def interactive_plot(change):
    selection = {}
    for cb in checkboxes[1:]:
        selection[cb.description] = cb.value
    #call some plot_function(data = data, selection = selection)

checkboxes = [widgets.Checkbox(value=False, description = "All"), widgets.Checkbox(value=False, description = "Box 1"), widgets.Checkbox(value=False, description = "Box 2")]
box = widgets.VBox(children = checkboxes)

checkboxes[0].observe(toggle_all)

for cb in checkboxes[1:]:
    cb.observe(interactive_plot)
display(box)

however, this leads to flicker as the boxes get ticked off one by one, which is hardly noticeable when the number of checkboxes is small, but slow and annoying when the list grows.

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Is there a better way to do this?

Currently no. Which is sad news, but the big upside is that you figured out the best way to do it :)

Alternatively you could try using the selectMultiple widget (https://ipywidgets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/examples/Widget%20List.html#SelectMultiple) though that won't give you checkboxes.

There's also an old issue on ipywidgets discussing adding the sort of widget that would solve your problem: https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets/issues/893. but it looks like it needs a champion to actually go an implement it.