When I add many items to Canvas why does the UI freeze? Say I have a loop from 1 to 1000. I can only see all the elements after all 1000 of them are added. Why doesn't the Canvas show up items as they are added or removed one at a time?
What can I do to achieve this effect? I want to animate the elements as they are added to Canvas one by one at a time. But the animation doesn't show up because the UI just freezes.
Thanks in advance:)
Perhaps you could use a timer, and add a smaller number of elements on each tick? That would let you ensure a few refreshes between each add.
On one project with lots of shapes on a canvas, I found it was helpful to pre-allocate and add all the shapes at the beginning, then just toggle their visibility. I don't know if that's generally useful or just specific to the situation I was in.
In VB.NET, we use Application.DoEvents() but I feel it is not possible in Silverlight.
Read this post: http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/12015/38635.aspx
Hope this helped!
Your code is being executed on the UI thread (the same thread that updates the screen). Hence, when you perform any computationally intensive operations your UI will freeze. Long running operations have to run in a separate thread in order for the application to remain responsive. Start a new thread and from within your thread iterate through your loop and instantiate your objects. To add the objects to the canvas you will have to use a Dispatcher to ensure that part of code runs on the UI thread.
MyElement element = new MyElement();
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => AddElementToCanvas(element));
Related
I have a Canvas with ca. 100 Lines and Ellipses.
Now I add 100s of these Canvas to a WrapPanel. This process takes ca. 4-5 Seconds.
Is there a Way to add/load these Canvases asynchrony? I didn't found a way to do so and Dispatcher.Invoke doesn't work (because it is not asynchrony).
Thanks for any suggestion...
Not sure async is the solution here, as I read your question it sounds like you're adding many thousands of UI elements to the UI which are all triggering.
Still not much to go on but...
There is only one UI thread so any work that can offloaded elsewhere will improve performance.
try adding Debug.WriteLine to your logic and use a StopWatch object to time stamp them. You can trace where delays are being created.
review the code which sets up the lines and ellipses, how are you calculating any properties such as size and position. If this can be loaded into an array using an async Task method, you might get some responsiveness back.
are all the elements visible on the screen at the same time. If not, only load the ones that are by using a virtualizing panel.
If you need more pointers, you might have to share the code.
I have a treeview and a textbox. As I type in the text box it updates the tree view in real time (filtering by what I type and matching against the objects in the tree view).
The problem is it starts freezing a bit as I'm typing in the box. ie. while the treeview is updating the text box freezes. I have put the logic that populates the treeview in another thread hoping this would make it run a bit faster - which it did, but not enough. I believe it is the actual UI updating which is causing the responsiveness to diminish.
What are some ways that I can tackle this problem? Is it possible to have different UI elements (in this case, the treeview and the textbox) handled in different threads - rather than just the logic which is the case now?
Thanks
Your problem is that only one UI thread exists!
A possible solution to your problem is to filter the treeview after a few milliseconds after the user has made a text input.
Another possibility is to make the filtering in a separate task and the result of the Treview reassign.
I hope this helps you with your problem.
What the tittle says, I have lengthy for loop in which based on some conditions I add objects to a Canvas. I want the objects to show as they are added but they show after the loop is done? Does anyone know why and how I can fix this?
Also: the textbox.text property doesn't get updated too.
The UI won't update while you are tying up the UI thread, you need to return control to allow it to render.
You should try to move long-running operations to a background thread if possible - say using a BackgroundWorker - and update the UI every so often. This should result in a much more responsive UI.
If you really need to do some lengthy work on the UI thread (eg you're adding a large number of controls that are slow to render) you'll have to break it up into manageable portions. You can wait for the CompositionTarget.Rendering event to know when the UI has rendered and you can continue. But it's much better to offload work to a background thread if you can.
I want to create a control which takes a while to create (Pivot) and then add it to the visual tree. To do this i would need to change the dispatcher of the control (and its heirachy) before adding it to the VisualTree.
Is this possible? Are there any implications of walking the controls trees and setting the _dispatcher field via reflection?
AFAIK this only works with Freezable derived classes. The best solution I see is to create the control on the UI Thread and show a progress bar during creation. To make this possible you will have to create the control in portions an let the progress bar update itself once in a while. This not only necessary for the progressbar but also will make sure that you application does not block.
Pseudocode (execure in extra thread):
this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(UpdateProgress(0));
this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(bigControlBuilder.Build(0,25));
this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(UpdateProgress(25));
this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(bigControlBuilder.Build(25,50));
this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(UpdateProgress(50));
this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(bigControlBuilder.Build(50,75));
this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(UpdateProgress(75));
this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(bigControlBuilder.Build(75,100));
this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(UpdateProgress(100));
this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(this.Children.Add(bigControlBuilder.GetControl()));
Update:
To make complex control more responsive you could also try UI-Virtualization/Data-Virtualisation:
Only load and show those visual items of the data items that are currently visible to ther user. Do not load and show visual items that are scrolled offscreen are to small to see or are in any other way invisible to the user. Upon userinteraction unload items that become invisble, load items that become visible.
To answer your question, I suppose it is possible to set _dispatcher using reflection but I would not recommend it at all. There is a deeply ingrained notion in WPF of thread affinity and STA so I wouldn't mess with that.
bitbonk's approach is a good one.
Another approach we have used in a project of ours was to create a second UI thread and have a progress indicator be rendered by the second UI thread while the first UI thread is building the UI. As long as the progress bar stays in the visual tree owned by the second UI thread, you should be good.
Im working on a reporting system, a series of DocumentPage are to be created through a DocumentPaginator. These documents include a number of WPF components that are to be instantiated so the paginator includes the correct things when later sent to the XpsDocumentWriter (which in turn is sent to the actual printer).
My problem now is that the DocumentPage instances take quite a while to create (enough for Windows to mark the application as frozen) so I tried to create them in a background thread, which is problematic since WPF expects the attributes on them to be set from the GUI thread. I would also like to have a progress bar showing up, indicating how many pages have been created so far. Thus, it looks like Im trying to get two things to happen in parallell on the GUI.
The problem is hard to explain and Im really not sure how to tackle it. In short:
Create a series of DocumentPage's.
These include WPF components
These are to be created on a background thread, or use some other trick so the application isnt frozen.
After each page is created, a WPF ProgressBar should be updated.
If there is no decent way to do this, alternate solutions and approaches are more than welcome.
You should be able to run the paginator in a background thread as long as the thread is STA.
After you've set up your thread, try this prior to running it.
thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
If you really must be on the GUI thread, then check out the Freezable class, as you might have to move the objects from your background thread to the GUI thread.
If the portions that require the UI thread are relatively small, you can use the Dispatcher to perform those operations without blocking the UI. There's overhead associated with this, but it may allow the bulk of the calculations to occur in the background and will interleave the work on the UI thread with other UI tasks. You can update the progress bar with the Dispatcher as well.
My guess is that everything that is time-consuming to create is within your Visual. If so, there is an easy solution: Don't create actual DocumentPage objects and their associated Visuals until DocumentPaginator.GetPage() is called.
As long as the code that consumes your document only requests one or two pages at a time there will be no performance bottleneck.
If you're printing to the printer or to a file, everything can be done on a background thread, but if you're displaying onscreen you only need to display a few DocumentPages at a time anyway. In either case you won't get any UI lockups.
The worst case scenario would be an app that displays pages in a thumbnail view. In this case, I would:
The thumbnail view would bind its ItemsSource to a "RealizedPages" collection which initially is filled with dummy pages
Whenever a dummy page is measured, it queues a dispatcher operation at DispatcherPriority.Background to call DocumentPaginator.GetPage() and then replace the dummy page in the RealizedPages collection with the real page.
If there are performance concerns even with realizing a single page because of the number of separate items, this same general approach can be used within whatever ItemsControl on the page has the large number of items.
One more note: The XPS printing system doesn't ever process more than one DocumentPage at a time, so if you know that's your client you can actually just keep returning the same DocumentPage over and over again with appropriate modifications.
Elaborating further on Ray Burns' answer: Couldn't you have your dataprocessing done in a class on a background thread and then databind the DocumentPage's properties to this class when the processing is done?
A little late to the game on this one, but I just worked out a solution to this so I thought I would share. In order to display the UI elements they have to be created on the UI thread on which they will be displayed. Since the long running task is on the UI thread, it will prevent a progress bar from updating. To get around this, I created the progress bar on a new UI thread and created the pages on the main UI thread.
Thread t = new Thread(() =>
{
ProgressDialog pd = new ProgressDialog(context);
pd.WindowStartupLocation = System.Windows.WindowStartupLocation.CenterScreen;
pd.Show();
System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run();
});
t.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
t.IsBackground = true;
t.Start();
Action(); //we need to execute the action on the main thread so that UI elements created by the action can later be displayed in the main UI
'ProgressDialog' was my own WPF window for displaying progress information.
'context' holds the progress data for my progress dialog. It includes a cancelled property so that I can abort the action running on the main thread. It also includes a complete property so the progress dialog can close when the Action has finished.
'Action' is the method used to create all the UI elements. It monitors the context for the cancel flag and stops generating the UI elements if the flag is set. It sets the complete flag when it is done.
I don't remember the exact reason I had to set Thread 't' to an STA thread and IsBackground to true, but I am pretty sure it won't work without them.