A way to avoid that ?

thomthom

@jim said:

Couple a thoughts - terminate the message with a c language null: '\0' (just in case?)

Isn't that just for strings?
The string I pass is just a data buffer that will be filled with binary data - which one has to extract.

@jim said:

More obviously, you don't need to peek every loop iteration - so something like:
refresh if (loop_counter % 500 == 0)

Yes - more pragmatic than calculating time. I like it, it's KISS.

Jim

@thomthom said:

Isn't that just for strings?

Yeah, I made an assumption the message was a c character array.

thomthom

@jim said:

@thomthom said:

Isn't that just for strings?

Yeah, I made an assumption the message was a c character array.

No, it's a MSG structure. Just didn't bother to work out exactly how large it is. (probably will be making a wrapper for this.) So I just make a large buffer while I quickly tested it.
...if I don't need the returned message, would it be ok to just send an empty buffer?

Dan Rathbun

@dan rathbun said:

@thomthom said:

Yes - as long as the operations a kept small it'll prevent whiteout.

"whiteout" = "ghost window"

...[snip]...

I would attempt to force a [PeekMessage](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms644943(v) system call, for Sketchup's thread, within the "responding inteval" (can't remember offhand what it is.)

So any way it's not your add entities block that needs to go inside a UI.start_timer proc, ... it's a API call to PeekMessage, like:

begin
>   peek = UI.start_timer(interval, true) {
>    peek_window_msg()
>   }
>   do_create_lots_of_model_entities()
>   UI.stop_timer(peek)
> end

where, peek_window_msg() would be a method that sets up and makes the proper API call.

@ThomThom & friends, ... I stumbled across where I saw the 'whiteout' interval.
It's specified on the [IsHungAppWindow](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms633526(v) Function reference page.
Says 5 seconds.

So perhaps:

begin
  interval =( Sketchup.version.to_i<8 ? 4 ; 4.9 )
  peek = UI.start_timer(interval, true) {
   peek_window_msg()
  }
  do_create_lots_of_model_entities()
  UI.stop_timer(peek)
end

thomthom

Interesting - from that article.

@unknownuser said:

An application is considered to be not responding if it is not waiting for input, is not in startup processing, and has not called PeekMessage within the internal timeout period of 5 seconds.

Though, it seems one can't reply on that time.

@unknownuser said:

The Windows timeout criteria of 5 seconds is subject to change.

I have set the interval to a handful of times per second because I use it to force SU to update its statusbar.

Dan Rathbun

I still wonder if a peek message loop could be written into the commit_operation API method.

Dan Rathbun

And there is another 'nutty' thing that happens. When the ghost window is created, it has a different handle then the "real" application window. There are a couple functions that return the other handle, depending on which window handle you grab. (Strange that the IsHungAppWindow function is "not for general use.")

thomthom

@dan rathbun said:

I still wonder if a peek message loop could be written into the commit_operation API method.

I made a wrapper iterator that will take an enumerator objects and wrap it in between start and commit operation while updating the progress in the statusbar, kept alive by PeekMessage limited to a certain interval. Works really well for simple one-iteration operations.

nikusknx

Update for Sketchup 2014 :


require "Win32API.rb
msg = "\000" * 36
peekMessage = Win32API.new('user32','PeekMessage' , 'PLIII', 'I')
peekMessage.call( msg, 0, 0, 0, 0x0000 ) != 0