MVVM Light message being received rarely, otherwise never received - wpf

I am having a strange issue with MVVM Light messaging. I am using it through my application and it has worked fine. I am now having a problem where my message is received roughly 10% of the time I try to send it. I'm assuming it gets shot off in to oblivion the other 90% of the time and I receive no errors and my application goes on as if nothing happened.
What I have is a context menu in a view that has a collection of statuses. Each user has a status and you can change it via this context menu. Every time the status changes I need to broadcast a message to another view model. This is the message that fails. Here is some code, feel free to ask me more questions if this is not clear enough for you.
This is located in my constructor, fired from a context menu item click:
this.UpdateUserStatus = new RelayCommand<UserStatusVM>(x =>
DispatcherHelper.CheckBeginInvokeOnUI(() =>
{
UpdateStatus(x);
}));
UpdateStatus method from relay command:
private void UpdateStatus(UserStatusVM status)
{
var userStatusEventId = _userService.CreateUserEvent(status.Id, CurrentUser.Id);
//This returns a business object that I would like to send
//over the wire to the other view model
var userEvent = _userService.GetUserEvent(userStatusEventId);
if (userEvent != null)
{
Messenger.Default.Send<UserEvent>(userEvent, "Broadcast");
}
//These fire off a collection changed event
CurrentUser.StatusId = status.Id;
CurrentUser.Status = status.Name;
CurrentUser.UpdatedDate = DateTime.Now;
CurrentUser.IsOnDuty = UserStatuses.IsOnDuty(status.Id);
}
and the message reception in the other view model:
Messenger.Default.Register<UserEvent>(this, "Broadcast", (userEvent) =>
{
proxy.Invoke("NewUserEvent", userEvent);
});

Related

WPF Application freezes for 20 seconds

I have a WPF (MVVM with Prism) application
There are quite a lot of factors that can affect this problem, but I will try to boil it down.
Hopefully I can at least get some tips how to trouble shoot this.
I have a user control containing a datagrid and a typical Search-button. The grid is initially empty and on SearchCommand. The user control uses a class "AccountServiceGateway" (_accountSG below) to make a request to the server, and then fills datasource of the grid with the result. Pretty standard.
VM: Binding command to handler in ctor
...
SearchCommand = new DelegateCommand(async () => await SearchOnServer(new AccountFilterDTO()));
VM, Button handler implementation
private async Task<bool> SearchOnServer(AccountFilterDTO filter)
{
var searchAccountResults = await _accountSG.SearchAccounts(filter);
//AccountSearchResultList is an observable collection that is datasource for the grid
AccountSearchResultList = new ObservableCollection<AccountSearchResultDTO>(searchAccountResults);
}
// Account Service gateway, making a web request
protected async Task<T> GetFromUrl<T>(string urlPart)
{
...
var response = await _httpClient.GetAsync(url);
resStr = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
//convert to T and return
}
EDIT
When I replace the implementation of GetFromUrl() with
await Task.Delay(5000)
return [hardcoded list of T]
everything works ok (although the hardcoded list is only 5 items)
END EDIT
Now to my problem. Getting an answer from the server taks about 1-2secs, as expected. I can follow the code until my datasource is filled. But then the GUI freezes for roughly (10-)20 seconds before anything is displayed, then efter the freeze, everything is as expected.
Other things to notice is that user control is in a Prism-region, within a Telerik RadTabbedWindow, so if this looks ok ith might be something else.
So my main question is, why does it hang for 20 seconds, I suspect there is some threading problem, but if it where a deadlock, wouldnt it hang forever? Any way to trouble shoot this?
Has the view changed in some way so that list virtualisation has been effectively turned off?
eg. Parent ScrollerViewer been added

WPF: Waiting for an ItemContainerGenerator to have its containers ready

I'm writing a WPF control that contains an ItemsControl. The control adds and removes items based on certain user actions. Once an item has been added, the control needs to access a FrameworkElement inside the ItemTemplate instance that was just created.
I'm using ItemContainerGenerator.ContainerFromIndex to do this. I also get a ContentPresenter back, but it is empty: it appears it takes a few milliseconds on a separate thread to instantiate the template objects.
I read that I need to use ItemContainerGenerator.Status to determine whether or not the containers are fully created, so I wrote the following method:
private async Task<TextBox> GetMainInputControl(int index)
{
// _selectedItemsEditor is the ItemsControl inside my main control that contains the items
var evt = new ManualResetEvent(false);
_selectedItemsEditor.ItemContainerGenerator.StatusChanged += (sender, args) =>
{
var status = _selectedItemsEditor.ItemContainerGenerator.Status;
if (status == GeneratorStatus.ContainersGenerated || status == GeneratorStatus.Error)
{
evt.Set();
}
};
ContentPresenter container = null;
await Task.Run(() =>
{
var status = _selectedItemsEditor.ItemContainerGenerator.Status;
if (status == GeneratorStatus.GeneratingContainers
|| status == GeneratorStatus.NotStarted)
{
evt.WaitOne();
}
container =
_selectedItemsEditor.ItemContainerGenerator.ContainerFromIndex(index) as ContentPresenter;
});
return container?.ContentTemplate.FindName("PART_ItemEditorMainInput", container) as TextBox;
}
I know that there are a few things I need to fix here, but mostly, it just doesn't work, because _selectedItemsEditor.ItemContainerGenerator.Status immediately returns GeneratorStatus.ContainersGenerated, so the code doesn't wait - but then the code container?.ContentTemplate.FindName throws an exception indicating that the container is NOT ready.
How can I make this work, or alternatively use a better way of achieving this?
That code looks like you're trying to access ui controls on a background thread. So I'm not at all surprised it doesn't work.
There are two approaches I would consider.
You could defer your code so it waits until the dispatcher ( the ui thread essentially ) has done it's stuff for whatever you just asked it to do.
Application.Current.Dispatcher.InvokeAsync(new Action(() =>
{
// Your code which is to run after the items are rendered
}), DispatcherPriority.ContextIdle);
Or
You could force the layout process so you make the items do their thing. This will potentially lock the ui up whilst it's working. If the user clicks something and his obvious intent is to wait for layout to update or there's not so much going on then this won't be a problem.
You could just call .UpdateLayout() on your control.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.uielement.updatelayout(v=vs.110).aspx

async await not waiting

Tried to find something similar and read all the answers given but couldn`t find something that will explain it to me.
Here is a sample code for opening a dialog popup (WPF). I want after the ShowOverlayView turns to True, that the UI will be accessible (this is why the async-await) and the program to wait until it is finished when the user clicks "Close".
Small clarification:
ShowOverlayViewModel sets a boolean to true/false for the Visibility property of a ContentControl. Since this is the case then I have nothing to wait for "the regular way".
Currently when the view is being "visible" the MessageBox is immediately shown.
Seems like it doesn`t wait for the AutoResetEvent.
Small update: It seems to be relevant specific to the MessageBox. I tried to change the Message property after the await code line and it occurred only after the are.Set(). I would still love to know why did the MessageBox act as it did.
private void CommandAction()
{
ShowOptionsDialog();
MessageBox.Show("");
}
private async void ShowOptionsDialog()
{
var are = new AutoResetEvent(false);
var viewmodel = new DialogPopupViewModel();
viewmodel.Intialize("some title", "some message", DialogPopupViewModel.YesNoCancelButtons);
SetOverlayViewModel(viewmodel);
viewmodel.SetCloseViewAction(() =>
{
HideOverlayView();
are.Set();
});
ShowOverlayView = true;
await Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
{
are.WaitOne();
//return viewmodel.DialogResult;
});
//return DialogResultEnum.Cancel;
}
Thanks for the help
Classic async-void bug. Research what async void does and why it's bad practice. Since ShowOptionsDialog() does not return a task that is awaited execution continues immediately. Change the return type to Task and await the result of the method call.
You can replace the event with a TaskCompletionSource<object> and say await myTcs.Task. A TCS is a more TPL-friendly event.

FromCurrentSynchronizationContext block throwing nullreferenceexception on Windows Form close

I am developing a windows form application. Following is the code segment that is executed on a button click event.
var taskExecute= Task<Datatable>.Run(() =>
{
return = GetDt(); // time consuming method
})
.ContinueWith(task=>
{
this.datagridVal.Datasource = task.Result;
}, TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext());
this works fine. But If I start the thread and then immediately click on the cross(x) button of the form then the following line of code throws NullReferenceException (most probably because the form has been already disposed and so is the datagrid control)
this.datagridVal.Datasource = task.Result;
How can I modify the code so that this block of code does not throw any exception if the form is closed when the thread is running? Also please suggest if there is any better way to handle the scenario using
If the problem indeed comes from the fact that the form is disposed, then you could handle that with this.IsDisposed:
var taskExecute= Task<Datatable>.Run(() =>
{
return = GetDt(); // time consuming method
})
.ContinueWith(task=>
{
if (!this.IsDisposed)
{
this.datagridVal.Datasource = task.Result;
}
}, TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext());

WPF issue with updating

I have a strange issue. I wonder whether it's a standard behavior of the .NET components, and how to handle this.
Our app is using galasoft mvvm light. I have a form with a tree view, which is getting the data via an asynchronous call. And why that asynchronous task is running, we're showing a progress bar to the user. I'm using ObservableCollection as a collection for my tree structure. Now the problem:
This piece of code gives us the info:
public Task<ObservableCollection<FillingTreeNode>> GetTreeStructureAsync(SyncSettings settings)
{
SearchRequest request = BuildRequest();
return searchService.SearchRecordsAsync(request).ContinueWithConversion(
records => new ObservableCollection<FillingTreeNode>(records
.Select(cabinet => new FillingTreeNode
{
IsChecked = false,
DisplayName = cabinet.Fields[Fields.CabinetName].Value,
Node = cabinet.AsFillingNode(FillingNodeType.Cabinet),
NumberOfNodes = SendXmlRequest(record),
Children = new ObservableCollection<FillingTreeNode>(GetChildren (record));
}
}
This is the task extension to convert the result to some new type:
public static Task<TNew> ContinueWithConversion<TOld, TNew>(this Task<TOld> task, Func<TOld, TNew> conversionAction)
{
return task.ContinueWith(completedTask => conversionAction(task.Result));
}
Now the issue. The data is loaded from the server, the UI (the progress bar) says that the data is loaded, and only after that SendXmlRequest(record) (which is a bit long to wait) begins to work! But i expect that it's already done. The user sees nothing until those functions are finished working
Do you know what is the cause of the problem? Can that be the behavior of the Observable collection? How can i fix it?
Thank in advance.

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