Designing gui, how to update several controls from collection of variables

Question

I've been developing a gui (or HMI) for a manufacturing machine for about a year now. There are about ~5000 parameters in the machine that the gui needs read access to.

Currently I have a daemon thread collecting all the variables from the machine as a couple of big datablocks from the machine and parse them out and put them in a list on the gui.

I collect, update and parse everything in less than 40ms which is way below the necessary update frequence of 1 second that is required so I consider this working just fine.

The problem is then how to update the Controls in the actual gui. Since I can only update a control on the same thread it is created on. Im currently using a different thread looping through all the Controls and then using BeginInvoke (winform) or Dispatcher (wpf) to update everything for the user. This seems overly complicated to me.

Is there anyone out there who have done something similiar or have a more elegant way of updating the gui?

Thanks!

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 12 '12 at 06:43

0

Try using the BackgroundWorker

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.backgroundworker.aspx

In the DoWork event collect the data and pass it in chunks with the report progress feature or all at once in the result. It saves you the need to use Invoke.

answered Jul 12 '12 at 06:43

Amiram Korach

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Will the UI become unresponsive if I put to much in the result handler? – user1029697 Jul 13 '12 at 08:51
It depends on how much time the UI needs to update itself with this data. In order to improve performance you can remove all formatting, use light weight controls and suspend the painting until you finish update controls. Look here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/487661/how-do-i-suspend-painting-for-a-control-and-its-children – Amiram Korach Jul 13 '12 at 11:22

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 12 '12 at 06:48

There in an other alternative threading method ,

Define this code in constructor,

     RunAsynchroneWork(new DoWorkEventHandler(RestartOnLoaded), new    RunWorkerCompletedEventHandler(RestartOnLoaded_Completed));

and write following codes into related place

 //AsynchroneWorker 
    public void RunAsynchroneWork(DoWorkEventHandler workHandler, RunWorkerCompletedEventHandler workCompletedHandler = null)
    {
        BackgroundWorker backgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker();
        backgroundWorker.DoWork += workHandler;
        if (workCompletedHandler != null) backgroundWorker.RunWorkerCompleted += workCompletedHandler;
        backgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync();
    }

   public void RestartOnLoaded(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
    {

    //DO SOMETHING HERE   

    }


    public void RestartOnLoaded_Completed(object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e)
    {
      //DO SOMETHING HERE ( after completion of RestartOnLoaded ) 
    }

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 12 '12 at 11:14

You can fire event that do the work of adding items, updating textboxes to the list as shown in the below example using ListView. You just have to add variables in global scope so they can accessed by any backgroundworker as well as UpdateUiEvent.

ListViewItem _listViewItem;

private void BackgroundWorkerDoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
{
    //your loop to get list view item
    _listViewItem = new ListViewItem(mytext) {tag = mytagobject);
    _listViewItem.SubItems.Add(mysubitemtext);
    Invoke(new EventHandler(UpdateUiEvent), new[] { sender, e });
}

void UpdateUiEvent(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    listView1.Items.Add(_listViewItem);
}

Designing gui, how to update several controls from collection of variables

3 Answers3