I have experienced this behavior in my automation application: when I "click" a button by calling the InvokePattern.Invoke() method everything stops until the handler of the click event inside the automated application finishes.
While this can make some thing simple (for example I don't have to write tons of code to wait for a dialog with progress bar to disappear, because I simply get the control back when everything is done), but I can't do anything else. It even blocks the access to the Automation API in another thread where it continues after the click handler is done.
This causes problems when click handler in the automated application opens a modal dialog, then I can't do anything, the access to the application through automation API is blocked until the dialog is manually closed.
Has anybody solved this somehow and can help me?
Thanks,
Karel
PS: Reference source is saying this:
Request that the control initiate its action.
/// Should return immediately without blocking.
/// There is no way to determine what happened, when it happend, or whether
/// anything happened at all
public void Invoke() { ... }
Edit: It works perfectly when automating Windows notepad application which is not a .NET application. And it does not work for a Notepad clone (C# WinForms aplication).
Related
I have a Lotusscript agent behind a submit button that takes a while to do everything....the user needs to know it is processing so that they do not click the button multiple times.
Am using #Command([RunAgent];"agentname") to kick the agent off.
How in Lotusscript could I add some kind of 'processing' indication, either a progress bar or a spinner or something? I suppose I could embed some javascript inside the lotusscript, but hoping someone has a clean example or some tips to do this.
Maybe hiding the submit button at the same time if I use javascript via a display property on a surrounding the button would help too.
You can't do this with LotusScript coding, and while hiding the Submit button is a good idea, you're going to have to know when to unhide it. A simple #Command([RunAgent]...) call won't give you a way to do that.
You're going to have to redesign your form to include a significant amount of JavaScript and make an AJAX-style call to invoke your agent asynchronously via a ?OpenAgent URL sent in a POST request via XMLHttpRequest. Your main JavaScript code will continue after the call and launch the spinner, and the callback that you set up to handle the asynch return from the XMLHttpRequest can then either transition to a new page or stop the spinner by setting a variable that the spinner is checking once every second or two.
I need to write a log when the application starts and exits. Obviously when it starts it easy to write the log. But a user can close an application in multiple ways, even shut it down in task manager. is there sort of a global event when shutting an application down it will call a specific event from anywhere and I can add my logging code?
In visual Studio, go to the project properties window, Application tab. AT the bottom is a button labelled 'View Application Events' This takes you to a code view where you can add handlers for the application events including the shutdown event. However, this isn't always fired if your application crashes ^H^H^H^H^H closes in an 'unusual' way.
The startup event is useful too - you could put your startup logging code in there- we use it a lot to put in all the application setup code, with only a splash screen showing, then when the startup code completes the main window will pop up.
Finally, the Unhandled Exception event is a handy place to put a final catch-all backstop error handler
Here is a similar question to mine regarding how to programmatically close a MessageDialog in a Win8 app, but the author of the question is using C#. I'm curious about how to solve the issue with WinJS. Is there any way to cancel a MessageDialog programmatically with WinJS without have access to the CommanUI objects within the dialog itself? I cannot simply invoke the handler associated with an appended CommandUI button since, in some cases, I wouldn't know which button index has that functionality.
Any tips?
Thanks!
MessageDialog.showAsync returns an IAsyncOperation<IUICommand> object and inherits from IAsyncInfo. The IAsyncInfo interface includes a cancel method which generically cancels asynchronous operations. In the case of the message dialog, calling cancel on the async operation will dismiss the dialog if it is still present.
var asyncOperation = messageDialog.showAsync();
asyncOperation.cancel();
More info on the WinRT asynchronous programming pattern can be found on MSDN.
I wrote a VB.NET Windows Forms app that requests a string from an out-of-process COM object every time the activate event fires. My form has two tabs, so I need to programmatically flip to the correct tab every time my window gains focus. Works fine, until...
By chance, someone ran a vbscript (yes, script, not exe) that contains:
Set shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
shell.AppActivate("Window Title That Matches My App")
This script consistently crashes my app. Usually so badly that the Exception dialog usually can't paint itself. I have to kill it from task manager. Sometimes the Exception is readable. (I also confirmed the exception by attaching to the running exe with Visual Studio). It's: "System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x8001010D): An outgoing call cannot be made since the application is dispatching an input-synchronous call."
What's really messing with my mind is that my app has multiple instance detection using a mutex, and if an existing instance is running, my own code (compiled) uses VB.NET's own AppActivate keyword, and this does NOT crash my app. It activates the running instance and exits the redundant instance as expected.
The problem seems solely to be triggered by cscript/wscript's AppActivate. I wrote a 3-liner .vbs to confirm this. It's repeatable.
Is there a way to trap or avoid this in my compiled app?
It's not clear to me WHY this approach actually fixes the problem, but it DOES work:
Add a timer to the form.
Move all the _Activated code to the timer's _Tick event.
Make the _Activated event start the timer.
Make the _Tick event stop the timer then perform the COM stuff.
I'm having a weird issue with form painting in the Compact Framework. I have a login dialog that is basically a small form that is opened on top of another using ShowDialog. When a card is swiped, the login dialog is supposed to close, then some login tasks are performed and then the form behind it should be activated. The problem is that the form behind the login dialog is not being refreshed and so the login dialog will not be removed until after the form behind is refreshed by some user action. This is probably due to the heavy processing that goes on in the login tasks part, but I've not found a way to solve this.
Basically, I want a way to force the application to close the dialog and paint everything again, before performing the heavy login tasks. I've tried numerous refresh methods without any luck:
Form loginDialog = new Form();
DialogResult result = loginDialog.ShowDialog();
loginDialog.Dispose();
//I've tried everything at this point to get the form to refresh before performing
//login tasks
this.Refresh();
this.Invalidate();
Application.DoEvents();
PerformHeavyLoginTasks();
Does anyone know what could be going wrong? Thanks
Ok I figured this out. The problem was with a custom control on the background form that manually paints itself using rectangles and such. I think this is a compact framework bug since I called Refresh and Invalidate on that control as well and it should've repainted. I had to create a method that would call the control's OnPaint override directly since Invalidate and Refreshed were pretty much ignored.
The issue, I believe, is that you're not fully understanding what's going on system-wise here.
When your fore window (the Dialog) is dismissed, the background window (the Form) is given focu and tol to repaint the clipping region where the dialog was. This happens via a PostMessage call, which sends a Windows Message that has to be popped, translated and dispatched down in the bowels of the Application.Run call.
This is, by design, a fairly slow process as the UI should not be preempting things that are important.
If you are doing heavy processing immediately after that PostMessage happens, the processing of those windows messages can often be slowed, ending up with the UI appearing "locked" or drawing really slowly. This is exacerbated if the processing you're doing is on the same thread as the UI.
Why are your efforst not making things better?
Calling Refresh simply sends another message. That message now gets in line for processing, so it would actually make things worse.
Calling Invalidate does pretty much the same this as Refresh, just asynchronously. Again, it makes things worse.
DoEvents tells the message pump to pop, translate and dispatch a message. That dispatch still has to be processed on the UI thread, so noting is going to happen until the thread has time to do the work (i.e. after your processing)
So how do we "fix" this?
The first step is often to put the processing on a separate thread to allow the scheduler to round-robin tasks between the UI and processing threads, up to the default quantum. Thgis means that the processing can only starve the UI for a maximum of 100ms before some sort of drawing is allowed to occur (assuming equal thread priority).
new Thread(PerformHeavyLoginTasks)
{
IsBackground = true
}.Start();
You can go a step further and give the UI a "jump start" on the processing (of 10ms in this example):
new Thread(new ThreadStart(delegate
{
Thread.Sleep(10);
PerformHeavyLoginTasks();
}))
{
IsBackground = true
}.Start();
Of course this may mean you need to now handle the next "display" asynchrously if the UI you want to display is dependent on the processing result. There are plenty of online resources for async patterns, so I won't beat that dead horse here.