Controlling priorities or interrupting an application

[Chris Brown]

I have built this app based on a form with several buttons, each to launch a different process. One of the buttons launches a process that is a number cruncher that has 35 parts that together take about 7 minutes to complete. I have a text box on the form in which I am trying to display progress messages like “1/35”, “2/35” etc. Once I hit the button, its code takes over and none of the progress messages are displayed. When done, the “35/35” shows. I’ve looked in help and googled and can find no graceful way to set relative priorities or even to interrupt the process, other than totally unacceptable task manager brute force. When I have this fully done, it will run full bore continuously – I will want a way to set higher priorities for other processes or at least interrupt it with a button and then resume. I tried the timer property for the form and it doesn’t seem to get called during the seven minutes. If I put a msgbox on the timer call, the box doesn’t come up once I hit the button.

Any ideas? Am I going to end up doing multithreading or run multiple instances of the app? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

thx, cb

[ADezii]

You may have to somehow incorporate the DoEvents() Function in your Logic so that you can yield execution to the Operating System so that it can process other events. In the Demo Code that I have created, with every 100,000th Iteration of the Loop, the Code yields to the OS so that a Label can be updated with the Processing Status (as a Percentage). Hope this helps.

Dim x As Long
Const conMAX_VALUE As Long = 1000000000
 
x = 1
 
While x <= conMAX_VALUE
 If x Mod 100000 = 0 Then
   DoEvents
     Me![lblStatus].Caption = "Processing Status: " & Format$(x / conMAX_VALUE, "Percent")
 End If
   x = x + 1
Wend

P.S. - Without DoEvents, you would only see Processing Status: 100.00% at the completion of the Task.

[NeoPa]

Chris, you need to explain how your code is designed at the moment. Simply saying it doesn't do as expected leaves us very little to go on.

[Chris Brown]

Thanks - i wasn't aware of that function. Works great!