Question

I have a treeview with checkboxes and I have the following handler for the “AfterCheck” event:

private void trvAvailableFiles_AfterCheck(object sender, TreeViewEventArgs e)
{
    if (!_isCheckingInProgress)
    {
        trvAvailableFiles.BeginUpdate();

        var nodePath = e.Node.Tag.ToString();
        bool isChecked = e.Node.Checked;
        e.Node.Nodes.Clear();

        try
        {
            _fileTreeLogic.GetChildNodes(e.Node, true);
            e.Node.ExpandAll();

            _isCheckingInProgress = true;
            SetChildrenCheckState(e.Node, isChecked);
            _isCheckingInProgress = false;

        }
        finally
        {
            trvAvailableFiles.EndUpdate();
        }
    }
}

If you look closely you’ll see that I’m checking if “_isCheckingInProgress”. If it is not, then I proceed and expand all the nodes and call the SetChildrenCheckState() method. The problem I have encountered is that SetChildrenCheckState() will subsequently cause each child node to all fire the AfterCheck event for its own node.

My question is, is there a more clean way to allow the first AfterCheck event to fire but not the subsequent ones? It seems kind of hackish that I have to have an instance bool variable to check and set.

Answer 1

One recommendation you’ll see occasionally around SO is to not put a lot of code into event handlers themselves. There are a number of reasons for this. First, in your case it would be easier to understand a call like:

private void trvAvailableFiles_AfterCheck(object sender, TreeViewEventArgs e)
{
    if (!_isCheckingInProgress) 
    {
        _isCheckingInProgress = true;
        try { GetAvailableFiles(); } catch {}
        _isCheckingInProgress = false;
    }
}

And to place the rest of your code in GetAvailableFiles(). This creates a separation between event code and action code which most people would agree is a worthwhile distinction to make.

Second, which may or may not be applicable in your case is that multiple events can cause the same action. Such as mnuFileQuit_Click and btnClose_Click as an obvious example. If both make calls to CloseApplication() it removes a lot of redundant code.