Question

I am looking for information on using a treeview in safethread manner. Does any one have experance with this or know of some online links to research.

Thanks

Answer 1

From the MSDN documentation on System.Windows.Forms.TreeView:

Any public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe. Any instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe.

Fortunately for you, there is a mechanism in Windows Forms to handle controls from multiple threads in a thread safe way:

public delegate void TreeActionDelegate(WhatToDo details);  public void DoSomethingWithThisTree(WhatToDo details) {     // Assuming that 'this' points to a TreeView     if (this.InvokeRequired) this.Invoke(new TreeActionDelegate(),         new object[] { details });     else     {         // The body of your function     } } 

Now you can invoke this function from any thread:

DoSomethingWithThisTree(new WhatToDo('something')); 

This will guarantee that the code that manipulates your tree will be executed in the thread that created the TreeView, hence it will be thread-safe. If you don’t want to inherit from TreeView, you can just use treeInstance.InvokeRequired and treeInstance.Invoke().