I have this wxWidgets OnButtonClick event handler, that apparently holds
a lock on all widgets in my form, but this event handler is supposed to
end a thread in the background - while that thread is supposed to update
widget content. So if I want to wait for the thread to end in the event
handler, I have 2 threads waiting on each other - with the one in the
background waiting to access the widget content.
My current workaround is to introduce a boost::mutex, have the
background thread acquire a lock on it upon start, release upon end, and
the OnButtonClick event handler will check (or try to acquire and
instantly release) the lock on that mutex to make sure the previous
background thread has ended before starting a new one.
The according code looks like this:
boost::mutex mutexChecka;
typedef boost::mutex::scoped_lock lockaChecka;
void demonstrateFrameLock()
{
cout << "child thread: acquiring lock" << endl;
lockaChecka lc (mutexChecka);
cout << "child thread: got lock" << endl;
sleep (1);
cout << "child thread: taking a nap (2 seconds)" << endl;
sleep (2);
cout << "child thread: woke up!" << endl;
cout << "child thread: mainWindow->txt1->GetValue = " <<
mainWindow->txt1->GetValue() << endl;
cout << "child thread: unlocking" << endl;
lc.unlock();
cout << "child thread: unlocked" << endl;
cout << "child thread: thread finished" << endl;
}
void debuggingGUImainFrame::OnToggle( wxCommandEvent& event )
{
cout << "main thread: acquiring lock" << endl;
lockaChecka lc (mutexChecka);
cout << "main thread: got lock, unlocking" << endl;
lc.unlock();
cout << "main thread: unlocked" << endl;
if (myThread) {
cout << "main thread: deleting old thread" << endl;
delete myThread;
myThread = 0;
}
myThread = new boost::thread(&demonstrateFrameLock);
cout << "main thread: sleeping 5 seconds" << endl;
sleep (5);
cout << "main thread: done sleeping" << endl;
// myThread.join(); // old code, never got this to work due to the lock
on form controls
cout << "main thread: thread finished" << endl;
}
This gets the job done, but it really doesn't seem very pretty to me -
so being a newbie with thread programming, I would appreciate any
comments on how to improve this code (which is, of course, incomplete
and just the sample that remained after long hours of debugging).
Thank you in advance!
Lars
