Hi,

I am not sure if multithreading is the answer but i wonder what should i do
and how to prevent the "locking" of a form and event response when there is
some activity that takes too much time.

For example, i open a data file and process the data. While processing, the
form looks as if it hangs.
How come "professional" applications dont do that? Just showing the
hourglass is not enough.

What should i do to allow other user interaction and process the data in the
"background".

Thanx in advance!

-Steve

Show quote Hide quote Put a load of DoEvents in the bit that is doing the processing

Be careful to prevent the system 're-entering' the same routine

Show quote Hide quote While Doevents would be the right answer, I would rather suggest that
it be used very sparingly, instead of dropping in a 'load'.  ;-)

If there is a loop executing one iteration every 5 ms that takes 3 minutes
to complete, then simply ading one DoEvents inside the loop could bump
that up to a 7 minute event.

DoEvents only needs to execute 4 or 5 times a second for it to allow
normal user activity.  To do that, some sort of counter (or the loop
iterator) could be used to be sure DoEvents only gets called once in a
while:

For idx = 0 to 999999
  ' Other code
  If (idx And &HFFF) = &HFFF then DoEvents
Next

In that way DoEvents is only called once for every 4096th iteration.
The values would need to be adjusted, depending on how much time
that other loop code requires, so that DoEvents is called only a few times
in a second, rather than on every iteration.

The 'watch out for re-entry' conditions still remain....

LFS

On Sat, 22 Oct 2005 06:03:31 -0500, "Larry Serflaten"
<serfla***@usinternet.com> wrote:

Show quoteHide quoteYes, agreed
- what I should have said is shove in a load of DoEvents until things
look Ok, then start removing them until things deteriorate.

I kind of forgot to mention the Golden Rule
- remove redundancies

Astutely caught

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