Question

Say I have a button: btnExecute

This button executes all these methods:

doAction1();
doAction2();
doAction3();
doAction4();

Each of these actions takes a couple of seconds.

How would I go about updating a progress bar as each of these methods are run?

I know I could go into each of them and just add pbExecuteProgress.value = 10 for example but I feel like there must be a better way to do this.

I also do not want to do something like this:

doAction1();
pbExecuteProgress.value = 30
doAction2();
pbExecuteProgress.value = 60
doAction3();
pbExecuteProgress.value = 80
doAction4();
pbExecuteProgress.value = 100

Is there ANY way I create a progress bar that goes up to 100 in value and is = to the progress of a method??

Answer 1

var actions = new List<Action> {doAction1, doAction2, doAction3, doAction4};

foreach(var action in actions)
{
   action();
   progressBar.Value += (progressBar.Maximum - progressBar.Minimum) / actions.Count;
}

if you wanted to customize the progress values:

var actions = new Dictionary<Action, int> 
{
     {doAction1, 30}, 
     {doAction2, 30}, 
     {doAction3, 20}, 
     {doAction4, 20},
};

progressBar.Minimum = 0;
progressBar.Maximum = actions.Select(kvp=>kvp.Value).Sum();
progressBar.Value = 0;
foreach(var action in actions)
{
   action.Key();
   progressBar.Value += action.Value;
}

Declaration and creation of the collection of actions does not have to happen just before you loop through it. In fact, a strength of this pattern (a form of the Strategy pattern) is that new Actions can come from anywhere, both inside the current class and out.