pygtk Recent File Chooser

I have started working on a new opensource project, using pygtk and Python (details on the project at a later stage). I wanted to add the ability to select recent files from the main menu. While pygtk provides classes to enable this (RecentManager, RecentChooserMenu), I couldn't find any code examples. So here is an example that adds a Recent Files submenu to a menu item.
The code assumes there is an existing menu item 'self.mnuRecent' that the recent files sub menu will be attached to.


#Add a recent projects menu item
manager = gtk.recent_manager_get_default()
#define a RecentChooserMenu object
recent_menu_chooser = gtk.RecentChooserMenu(manager)
#define a file filter, otherwise all file types will show up
filter = gtk.RecentFilter()
filter.add_pattern("*.avi") #set this to whatever file type you want
#add the filter to the RecentChooserMenu object
recent_menu_chooser.add_filter(filter)
#add a signal to open the selected file
recent_menu_chooser.connect('item-activated', self.recent_item_activated)
#Attach the RecentChooserMenu to the main menu item
mnurecent = self.mnuRecent
mnurecent.set_submenu(recent_menu_chooser)

##

def recent_item_activated(self, widget):
"""Activated when an item from the recent projects menu is clicked"""
uri = widget.get_current_item().get_uri()
# Strip 'file://' from the beginning of the uri
file_to_open = uri[7:]
#code here to open the selected file

## In your code where you open a file, you need to add the file to the recent items manager

manager = gtk.recent_manager_get_default()
manager.add_item('file://' + file_uri)


Hopefully someone will find this example useful.