CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wpfmultithreadinguser-interfacecontrolsdispatcher
J. Lennon
J. Lennon

Reputation: 3361

UI Intensive Application

In my program, there is a map editor, after loading the information from the database, I need to generate some custom controls (6000-10000 depending on the map). Unfortunately it locks the user's screen for 10-20 seconds.

How can I do using lazy loading? How can I do without crash and lock screen?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 390

Answers (3)

Dean Kuga
Dean Kuga

Reputation: 12119

Use TPL (Task Parallel Library) to do the DB tasks on a separate thread... it looks like this:

Task.Factory.StartNew(() => MyLongRunningMethod));

Check out this great article over on CodeProject for more information...

EDIT: As noted below the original answer implied that somehow controls can be generated on a separate thread but in reality as a part of the visual tree and therefore the UI, controls must be generated on the UI thread so that was not a valid suggestion...

EDIT: Don't see how it would be possible to fit 10000 custom controls on a signle screen so there must be a way to use some type of virtualization schema where only visible controls would get generated and the rest of the controls would get generated on demand...

Upvotes: 0

dowhilefor
dowhilefor

Reputation: 11051

This question is much to broad. But i can give you a number of hints. First of all i'am pretty sure you don't need so many custom controls. Think about how many input devices the user has, he can't interact with that many controls at the same time. So you can "cheat" about these controls in a couple of different ways. For example, display an image of the control, and switch it if the user starts to interact with it. Another thing is, you don't need what you don't see. Why create a list of 10000 Elements if only 10 will fit on the screen? There is no reason, thats why there are ways to mitigate that, one is called Virtualization which can be done in a number of ways. You can use UI Virtualization, by defer the loading of the ui components or use data virtualization. Another thing, in cooperation with data virtualization is to use threads or a background worker to handle the load of that much data. Create your data in batches to give the UI Thread time to handle the windows messages.

Upvotes: 2

MAckerman
MAckerman

Reputation: 428

Look into Binding or doing the work in a Background thread? If they are in a ListView, look into VirtualMode: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.listview.virtualmode.aspx

What are you loading these controls into? Are you doing it in the UI thread?

Upvotes: 1

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