display Hourglass when application is busy

Question

For a view constructed using WPF, I want to change the mouse cursor to a hourglass when the application is busy and nonresponsive.

One solution is to add

Answer 1

I personnaly prefer to not see to mouse pointer switching many times from hourglass to arrow. To help prevent that behavior while calling embedded functions that take a while and each try to control the mouse pointer, I use a stack (counter) that I call a LifeTrackerStack. And only when the stack is empty (counter to 0) that I set back the hour glass to an arrow.

I also use MVVM. I also prefer thread safe code.

In my root class of model I declare my LifeTrackerStack that I either populate in childs model classes or use directly from child model classes when I have access to it from them.

My life tracker have 2 states/actions:

• Alive (counter > 0) => turn Model.IsBusy to true;
• Done (counter == 0) => turn Model.IsBusy to false;

Then in my view, I manually bind to my Model.IsBusy and do:

void ModelPropertyChanged(object sender, System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.PropertyName == "IsBusy")
    {
        if (this._modelViewAnalysis.IsBusy)
        {
            if (Application.Current.Dispatcher.CheckAccess())
            {
                this.Cursor = Cursors.Wait;
            }
            else
            {
                Application.Current.Dispatcher.Invoke(new Action(() => this.Cursor = Cursors.Wait));
            }
        }
        else
        {
            Application.Current.Dispatcher.Invoke(new Action(() => this.Cursor = null));
        }
    }

This is my class LifeTrackerStack:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading;

namespace HQ.Util.General
{
    /// 

    /// Usage is to have only one event for a recursive call on many objects
    /// 
    public class LifeTrackerStack
    {
        // ******************************************************************
        protected readonly Action _stackCreationAction;
        protected readonly Action _stackDisposeAction;
        private int _refCount = 0;
        private object _objLock = new object();
        // ******************************************************************
        public LifeTrackerStack(Action stackCreationAction = null, Action stackDisposeAction = null)
        {
            _stackCreationAction = stackCreationAction;
            _stackDisposeAction = stackDisposeAction;
        }

        // ******************************************************************
        /// 

        /// Return a new LifeTracker to be used in a 'using' block in order to ensure reliability
        /// 
        /// 
        public LifeTracker GetNewLifeTracker()
        {
            LifeTracker lifeTracker = new LifeTracker(AddRef, RemoveRef);

            return lifeTracker;
        }

        // ******************************************************************
        public int Count
        {
            get { return _refCount; }
        }

        // ******************************************************************
        public void Reset()
        {
            lock (_objLock)
            {
                _refCount = 0;
                if (_stackDisposeAction != null)
                {
                    _stackDisposeAction();
                }
            }
        }

        // ******************************************************************
        private void AddRef()
        {
            lock (_objLock)
            {
                if (_refCount == 0)
                {
                    if (_stackCreationAction != null)
                    {
                        _stackCreationAction();
                    }
                }
                _refCount++;
            }
        }

        // ******************************************************************
        private void RemoveRef()
        {
            bool shouldDispose = false;
            lock (_objLock)
            {
                if (_refCount > 0)
                {
                    _refCount--;
                }

                if (_refCount == 0)
                {
                    if (_stackDisposeAction != null)
                    {
                        _stackDisposeAction();
                    }
                }
            }
        }

        // ******************************************************************
    }
}


using System;

namespace HQ.Util.General
{
    public delegate void ActionDelegate();

    public class LifeTracker : IDisposable
    {
        private readonly ActionDelegate _actionDispose;
        public LifeTracker(ActionDelegate actionCreation, ActionDelegate actionDispose)
        {
            _actionDispose = actionDispose;

            if (actionCreation != null)
                actionCreation();
        }

        private bool _disposed = false;
        public void Dispose()
        {
            Dispose(true);
            // This object will be cleaned up by the Dispose method.
            // Therefore, you should call GC.SupressFinalize to
            // take this object off the finalization queue
            // and prevent finalization code for this object
            // from executing a second time.
            GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
        }

        protected virtual void Dispose(bool disposing)
        {
            // Check to see if Dispose has already been called.
            if (!this._disposed)
            {
                // If disposing equals true, dispose all managed
                // and unmanaged resources.
                if (disposing)
                {
                    _actionDispose();
                }

                // Note disposing has been done.
                _disposed = true;
            }
        }
    }
}

And the usage of it:

    _busyStackLifeTracker = new LifeTrackerStack
        (
            () =>
            {
                this.IsBusy = true;
            },
            () =>
            {
                this.IsBusy = false;
            }
        );

Everywhere I have lengthy jog, I do:

        using (this.BusyStackLifeTracker.GetNewLifeTracker())
        {
            // long job
        }

It works for me. Hope it could help any! Eric