GUI enable/disable Is it bad style?

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5.00/5 (2 votes)

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Hello all
A lot of times I do enable/disable GUI elements in “OnIdle” according to the systems state (I’m aware, this is definitively not the way if determine the state costs CPU).

More and more I feel this is a lazy way and I become unhappy with this.

Can somebody confirm that this is a bad technique? If yes what is the better way?

Thanks a lot.
Regards

Posted 4-May-12 6:54am

idle63

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 4-May-12 15:41pm

Reason for my vote of 5
Interesting enough, my 5 for the question.
--SA

Sandeep Mewara 4-May-12 15:43pm

5 to your question and you.

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-04T07:07:00

Solution 1

Yes and no. At least it is not obviously bad and widely used. It depends how you use it. It's hard to say without seeing the detail.

Best techniques are lazy: they can be sophisticated in fundamentals but lazy in ad-hoc usage; they should not require a lot of boring calculations and too much attention from a human being who happened to be an application developer.

Now, you lazy approach should be good only if you use the lazy pattern. In this case, nothing should happen to the system if you don't touch keyboard and mouse. If this is not true, that is, if something happens to the UI periodically, this certainly cannot be good. The state check cycle could be excessive; and you should be realistic in CPU usage: when something happens on one click, an extra millisecond does not count.

The best technique should work like this:

You can have some UI-wide StateDirty flag. A change in a single control should set this flag to true and send a UI-wide message which should trigger the full state update cycle. It's no too bad if the cycle is too excessive and often does not change everything, because an extra millisecond does not count. But it would be be acceptable if this happens periodically without user intervention. The UI should 100% sleep if nothing disturbs the system.

—SA

Posted 4-May-12 7:07am

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov

Comments

[no name] 4-May-12 13:18pm

Wow! Thanks for this answer.
Regards, Bruno

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 4-May-12 15:14pm

You are very welcome.
--SA

Sandeep Mewara 4-May-12 15:13pm

My 5! No idea who 1-voted it. :doh:

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 4-May-12 15:17pm

Thank you, Sandeep.
Well, that answer is not certain enough and can be considered questionable. I did not want to spend more time on it because platform and UI library were not specified. The idea to use the OnIdle (or something like that) is questionable, it should not be used literally. Someone could be a strong opponent of using the idle thing; and I did not explain properly that it should be used with care and how exactly...
--SA

[no name] 4-May-12 15:24pm

More then properly enough for such a general question. I think with the details everybody has to fight by her/himself (sorry for my English). Thanks again!

[no name] 4-May-12 15:19pm

I do not hope it was me I'm sure I clicked 5...or then it was an OnIdle side effect ;) No I clicked 5, definitively! Regards and thanks, Bruno

Uups....it was me, sorry! I corrected it ;)

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 4-May-12 15:40pm

No problem at all. This question is pretty interesting, so I will vote 5 for the question.
If you need further discuss it, don't hesitate to ask some follow-up questions.
--SA

[no name] 4-May-12 17:08pm

I’m glad to come back, but please don’t feel forced to answer. Yes, at least for me also this question is pretty interesting… [In the following ‘pnsca’ means state of ‘previous/next/skip/complete/abort’] By the way this question is/was related to another question “wizard design pattern” I posted in this forum. Because in a ‘Wizard’ for me personally it is really hard to decide where to determine ‘pnsca’ (the more dependencies the harder). Is it better to determine and set when the action ‘pnsca’ is done or each time ’OnIdle’….? What I like to avoid is, to split it over both. …and another time by the way: I felt more and more be screwed when “OnIdle” throws an exception (caused by determining the state had a problem) …then it becomes ugly, because each mouse move, keyboard event etc. will blame me... That‘s why with time I feel uncomfortable with this ‘comfortable OnIdle’ solution…I don’t like try catch(…) and hide ‘it’. For me the question is: Should I enable/disable the UI on ‘pnsca’ in the “OnClick” handler (which is for my personal meaning the right way, but if I forgot one state also my death) or can I assemble everything in a nice way ‘OnIdle’ (in this case, probably with some tricky solution on start of the wizard)….That’s’ why I’m looking for a good pattern to help me Pro Idle: If I make some minor mistakes in the logic it is ‘_maybe_ self cured’ (I don’t like it really, it is ‘a lazy’ solution, but customers are happy if work goes on….) Pro Action: It is well defined. But as every programmer knows, keep in mind every situation and react correctly to it is time consuming. Sorry for my English ;) Regards, Bruno
Sorry, my crlf did not survived….stilll a beginner ;)

[no name] 4-May-12 17:06pm

Sorry, my crlf did not survived....