Re: [wxperl-users] Freezing windows

[Mattia B. <mb...@ds...>]

> Hi all..
> First, thanks for the great wxPerl tool! I=B4m a newbie both to Perl and
> wxWindows so i am having some hard times to get things working but
> slowly my script gets looking user friendly.
> 
> I'm writing a GUI wrapper on Windows 2000 with Activestate to a
> 'untouchable' perl script, and for that i am using the open function to
> get the output of the other script into a log window in the GUI. That
> part look like this:
> 
> open STATUS, "theotherscript.bat -s$settings{SERVER} -check 2>&1 |"
>                 or die "can't fork: $!";
>   while (<STATUS>) {
>     $this->{TEXTWINDOW}->AppendText($_);
>   }
> close STATUS or $this->{TEXTWINDOW}->AppendText("-- ABNORMAL TASK
> PROCESS ENDING. See log window for details. \n");
> 
> Now, if i stay at the window with the TextCtrl it works fine, i see the
> output popping up while processing. But this can take a few minutes so
> it will happen a lot that the user goes to another program, lets say to
> check his mail. If he clicks the wxPerl tab again to see how it is going
> nothing happens, the GUI will only come back when the child process
> ends. Why?, can i change this behaviour?
The problem is that you are stuck in an event handler, so the event
loop isn't processing new events. The 'real' solution for this
is using Wx::Process, that will be in the next release ( to be
released Really Soon ); as a workaround you could
put a Wx::Yield call right after the ->AppendText call
this way the GUI will be responsve only during the
Wx::Yield call, though

Regards
Mattia