Re: [Pythoncard-users] Inactivity TimeOut

[Kevin A. <al...@se...>]

On Sep 27, 2004, at 11:18 AM, Heimburger, Ralph P wrote:

> I know there is a timer example in the PythonCard sample applications
> but I would like to know if anyone has implemented an inactivity
> timeout:  If a user does not press a key or click within PythonCard app
> for a period of time, it will issue a self.Close().
>
The jabberChat sample has a simplistic implementation based on just 
checking whether the mouse has moved, so take a look at that. There was 
a question about something like this on the wxPython-users mailing 
list, so you might want to ask there as well. I think the person on 
wxPython-users was looking for a way of tapping into operating system 
APIs that showed overall system inactivity and wasn't specific to just 
their application.

The problem is that once your application is deactivated by the user 
switching to another application or minimizing your application you 
won't know if the user is actually active or not on the system. The 
global mouse position is a rough hack, but it obviously doesn't catch 
the case of the keyboard intensive user that avoids the mouse.

If the application is active and the cursor is in an editable field you 
should see idle events as the event queue empties; idle in wxPython and 
PythonCard terms simply means that the event queue just emptied, it 
does not mean the system is actually idle, which is one reason I've 
considered changing the event name. But you'll want to be more specific 
than that.

To check for the user being idle in your application you want to check 
for key presses as well as mouse movement or mouse presses. Assuming 
you don't have any component-specific handlers for mouseDown or 
keyDown, you might add some handlers in addition to the the check for 
mouse movement such as:

def on_keyDown(self, event):
     self.userIsIdle = False
     event.skip()

def on_mouseDown(self, event):
     self.userIsIdle = False
     event.skip()

Then you'll also want a timer handler that runs every second, that 
saves the current time when userIdle is False. When userIsIdle is True 
and your specified amount of time has passed then you can call 
self.close(). Something like:

if not self.userIdle:
     self.lastTimeUserNotIdle = time.time()
else:
     if time.time() - self.lastTimeUserNotIdle > self.idleTimeout: # 
idleTimeout should be specified in seconds
         self.close()

I didn't test the code, but that's the general idea. You still need to 
check whether the mouse has moved globally in your timer handler rather 
than in a mouseMove handler because you won't get a mouseMove unless it 
is over one of your components, so just borrow that code from 
jabberChat.

ka