WinJS - Preventing two quick button presses - windows-8

Question

We have a situation in an application in WinJS where our serialised data is read from a file on disk, and depending on the page, different sections of the file are accessed.
The problem we have is that when a user double taps a control, button, listview etc, the system will try to read the file twice and sporadically blows up.
Is there a recommended route in WinJS to prevent or handle double presses on controls? other than something like manually disabling and re-enabling all buttons when pressed?
We've looked at some options, including overriding addEventListener, but none are perfect, any suggestions in this area would be greatly appreciated.
Additional: Whilst in this example the problem is reading a file, we have other applications where performing quick double presses on lists will try to navigate to a page twice (and add it to the nav.history twice), so it seems like there are a number of places and symptoms where this kind of thing could occur.

Answer 1

The best way is to disable the buttons while processing and reenable them when done. This will provide appropriate feedback to the user if things take longer than expected.
You could disable them via databinding rather than setting them all manually.
HTML
<button id="button1" data-win-bind="disabled: disabled">Click</button>
<button id="button2" data-win-bind="disabled: disabled">Click</button>
<button id="button3" data-win-bind="disabled: disabled">Click</button>
<button id="button4" data-win-bind="disabled: disabled">Click</button>
JavaScript
var bindingSource;
app.onactivated = function (args) {
if (args.detail.kind === activation.ActivationKind.launch) {
if (args.detail.previousExecutionState !== activation.ApplicationExecutionState.terminated) {
// TODO: This application has been newly launched. Initialize
// your application here.
} else {
// TODO: This application has been reactivated from suspension.
// Restore application state here.
}
args.setPromise(WinJS.UI.processAll());
var disabledContext = { disabled: false }
var btn = document.getElementById("button1");
btn.addEventListener("click", buttonClickHandler, false);
WinJS.Binding.processAll(btn, disabledContext);
btn = document.getElementById("button2");
btn.addEventListener("click", buttonClickHandler, false);
WinJS.Binding.processAll(btn, disabledContext);
btn = document.getElementById("button3");
btn.addEventListener("click", buttonClickHandler, false);
WinJS.Binding.processAll(btn, disabledContext);
btn = document.getElementById("button4");
btn.addEventListener("click", buttonClickHandler, false);
WinJS.Binding.processAll(btn, disabledContext);
bindingSource = WinJS.Binding.as(disabledContext);
}
};
function buttonClickHandler(eventInfo) {
bindingSource.disabled = true
WinJS.Promise.timeout(5000).then(function (c) {
bindingSource.disabled = false
});
}
--Rob