Refresh PyGTK window every minute?

I have a PyGTK app that is supposed to be a desktop monitor of some data source. I have it almost complete but there is just this one problem of auto-refreshing.

In my program I want it to fetch data from database and refresh the window every minute. Here's what I have for the refresh function (it refresh once per second now for testing):

def refresh(self):
        cnxn = pyodbc.connect(r'Driver={SQL Server};Server=IL1WP0550DB;Database=Customer_Analytics;Trusted_Connection=yes;')

        cursor = cnxn.cursor()
        cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM TestGroup_test_group_result")

        data = []
        while 1:
            row = cursor.fetchone()
            if not row:
                break
            #data.append([row.TestGroupName, row.PWF, row.Expires, row.TestGroupID])
            data.append([str(datetime.now()), row.PWF, row.Expires, row.TestGroupID])

        cnxn.close()
        self.fill_text(data)

        threading.Timer(1, self.refresh).start()

Using this function I can update my window, but it only works when I drag my window around. When I put a series of print statements around, it looks like it is only executing the script when the window is moving.

Anyone know how to fix it?

Additional info: I realize that it only processes the refresh when there is a signal.

Solution

With GTK you need to make sure your widgets are only updated from the main thread. You can do this by using a timeout function with gtk.timeout_add() or gtk.timeout_add_seconds(). If you use python's threading functions the widgets are not updated from the main thread and so it does not work. For timeouts of greater than one second you should use gtk.timeout_add_seconds() as it avoids unnecessary wake ups where the timing isn't that critical.