Question

I call
obackgroundworker.CancelAsync();
on a background worker currently doing some work in another thread and then using
while (obackgroundworker.IsBusy == true)
to wait for it to finish before quitting the application (in case the user changes their mind while the thread is away processing and I want to close down cleanly)

The flat for cancellation pending is set to true correctly but the thread doesn’t quit, in the worker thread i have:

backgroundworker obackgroundworker = (backgroundworker)sender;
if (obackgroundworker.cancellationpending == true)
     e.cancel = true;              

which should check to see if a cancellation is pending and then set the cancelled flag to true, and i think that also causes the thread to actually terminate…? or is there some other function I need to call from the thread when it detects a cancellation to actually end?

I’ve read a lot of examples that use background workers exactly like above and don’t report any problems.

Sources:

http://www.albahari.com/threading/part3.aspx
http://www.dotneat.net/2009/02/10/BackgroundworkerExample.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cpp/BackgroundWorker_Threads.aspx

Thanks

Answer 1

Setting e.Cancel to true doesn’t stop the execution of the BackgroundWorker, it only indicates that the operation was canceled so that you can check it in the RunWorkerCompleted event. You need to stop the task by returning from the DoWork event handler :

BackgroundWorker obackgroundworker = (BackgroundWorker)sender;
if (obackgroundworker.CancellationPending == true)
{
     e.Cancel = true;
     return;
}