Implementing a data source

For most usages of the grid control, your application must define a custom data source to provide the data on demand when the grid requests to display it. The use of a data source allows virtualizing data storage to prevent duplicating the storage of data in both the control and the backing data field. In this recipe, we will take a look at how to create a custom PyGridTableBase to use as a data source for grid.

How to do it…

Perform the following steps:

1. First, in this recipe, we will retrieve backing data from the GitHub API, so we need to import a few extra modules from the Python standard library. We will do this as follows:

   import urllib
   import json
   import wx
   import wx.grid as gridlib

2. Let's start by defining the custom PyGridTableBase class to provide data to the grid:

   class MyDataSource(gridlib.PyGridTableBase):
       def __init__(self):
           super(MyDataSource, self).__init__()
           
           # Github change history for wxPython
           self._RetrieveData()...