One of the most common problems for new Kivy users is misunderstanding how the bind method works, especially amongst newer Python users who haven’t fully formed their intuition about function calls. For instance, a user will write code like:

some_screenmanager.bind(current=a_function(arg1, arg2))

Here, the idea is that when the current property changes, it will call a_function with the arguments arg1 and arg2.

The problem is that Python itself doesn’t work like this; the bind method doesn’t know about the existence of a_function or its arguments, it only receives the result of this function call. This often leads to confusion when a user doesn’t understand why the binding is only called once, during the declaration of the binding.

Stepping back, our real goal is to call a_function with the given arguments, but bind needs to be passed a function if it is to work correctly. That means we can solve our problem by creating a new function with these arguments already passed (and discarding the extra arguments automatically passed by bind).

It’s usually convenient to do this with the partial function from the functools module:

from functools import partial
some_screenmanager.bind(current=partial(a_function,arg1, arg2))

partial returns a new function that will automatically be passed arg1 and arg2, exactly as we want. You can also pass kwargs this way.

This isn’t the only way to solve the problem, we could have created a lambda function (though the syntax is longer and can have scope problems) or an entire new function with def syntax, but both of these are more complicated than the simple use of partial. So if you need to do a binding in Python, look at this way first!