Zip Component, Email Component, Encryption Component ActiveX Control for Zip Compression .NET Components for ASP.NET
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Index of Chilkat Blog Posts

November 9, 2007

Progress Monitoring in VB6 without Freezing the User Interface

This blog post describes how to use events to monitor the progress (with abort capability) of a Chilkat method call, while keeping the user-interface responsive.

One note: This article shows how to do it in the foreground thread. Passing events from background to foreground threads could be a tricky matter. This article discusses how to do it in VB.NET: http://www.chilkatsoft.com/p/p_301.asp I suspect that it’s not directly possible to update a Form control in VB6 from a background thread.

Ok, let’s begin…

The Chilkat components (Email, IMAP, HTTP, FTP2, Zip, etc.) provide a common property named HeartbeatMs. This controls the frequency, in milliseconds, at which an AbortCheck event is fired during a lengthy non-blocking call — such as when reading email, downloading a file, creating a zip archive, etc. The default value of HeartbeatMs is 0, which means that AbortCheck events are not called.

The trick to keeping your VB6 user-interface responsive is to set HeartbeatMs to a small value, such as 100ms. Within the AbortCheck event, call DoEvents to allow the VB6 runtime to process UI events. Here’s an example:

' When using events, you must declare the mailman "withevents"
Public WithEvents mailman As ChilkatMailMan
	
Dim bAbort As Integer
	
Private Sub ReadEmail_Click()
	
    mailman.MailHost = "mail.example.com"
    mailman.PopUsername = "myUsername"
    mailman.PopPassword = "myPassword"
    mailman.HeartbeatMs = 100
	
    Dim bundle As ChilkatEmailBundle
	
    ' Copy the email from the POP3 server without removing it.
    ' The progress bar will update with the percentage completion as
    ' the CopyMail proceeds.
    Set bundle = mailman.CopyMail()
	
    ' ...
	
End Sub
	
Private Sub AbortButton_Click()
    bAbort = 1
End Sub
	
' Abort check is called at intervals according to HeartbeatMs
Private Sub mailman_AbortCheck(abort As Long)
	
    ‘ If the abort button was pressed, bAbort is 1 and
    ‘ the operation is aborted.
    abort = bAbort
    DoEvents
	
End Sub
	
Private Sub mailman_ReadPercentDone(ByVal percentDone As Long, abort As Long)
    ‘ Set abort = 1 if you wish to abort.
    ProgressBar1.Value = percentDone
End Sub
	
Private Sub Form_Load()

	Dim glob As New ChilkatGlobal
	Dim success As Long
	success = glob.UnlockBundle("Anything for 30-day trial")

    ProgressBar1.Value = 0
    bAbort = 0
End Sub


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