Thursday 9 April 2009

Windows Timers in Gen GUI

Watching paint dry is not everyone’s idea of an interesting day at work, and for certain applications this is extra tedius when you have to click a ‘refresh’ button just to see how dry that paint has become.

Various functions in our applications submit background tasks and exhibit this mindless click-to-see-if-it-has-finished scenario. After much RSI and boredom we decided it was time to implement auto-refresh and timer events in the GUI so that at least you didn’t have to click the tired old mouse so much.

To achieve this in our Gen GUI we developed an EAB which we call to register and start a timer event in Windows (WM_TIMER messages). Basically this is a Windows event interception routine which processes the timer events we are interested in, and any other events get passed on to the default window event handler (the Gen GUI & Windows runtimes).

To make something actually ‘happen’ when the WM_TIMER event is received, TIREVENT is used to trigger an event in the client PStep, and the timer event is deactivated again, as far as Windows is concerned.

The event in the PStep can then do its' thing, and if it wants to repeat the timer again (like a regular auto-refresh) it simply calls the EAB again telling it to reactivate the timer.

Pretty simple stuff in principle, but a big improvement for the poor user and their aching click-finger.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I haven't been making GUI's for ages, but it's a good tip.

This rapidly became my favorite blog. Thanks guys, and a happy Easter;)

A.