Question

I have a pretty long running process which now freezes my application for a while.

How can i wrap this process in a backgroundworker and provide the user with a status.

I know that ideally the process itself would have to report its progress, but i dont think i can build that in. It’s not that i cannot change the code in that process, but i dont want to change it too much.

I would be nice if i could start the process in a backgroundworker so that my app stays responsive. Now this i can do. But the question is, is there an easy way to have some progressbar doing something to indicate that the process is still running?

private void worker_DoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
{
    StartLongRunningProcess();
}

My code is now like the above, and i was wondering how to wrap the process in some way that i can update a progressbar? Or is there an easy way to get some more information from this process without completely changing it’s code? Inside that long running process there is a modified row counter running, but it only return a value when it’s finished.

I know how the backgroundworker and it’s ReportProgress options work, but the problem is that the process just runs and doesn’t provide any feedback while running.

Answer 1

If you set the WorkerReportsProgress property to true you can then use the ProgressChanged event.

BackgroundWorker bw = new BackgroundWorker{WorkerReportsProgress = true}
bw.ProgressChanged += new ProgressChangedEventHandler(bw_ProgressChanged);

private void bw_ProgressChanged(object sender, ProgressChangedEventArgs e)
{
   var percent = e.ProgressPercentage;
   //update progress bar here
}

Then in your do work you can report the progress.

private void bw_DoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
{   
   BackgroundWorker worker = sender as BackgroundWorker;    
   e.Result = StartLongRunningProcess(worker);
}

public void StartLongRunningProcess(BackgroundWorker worker)
{
   worker.ReportProgress(percentComplete);
}

You can find the full example here