HtmlDialog as progresswindow

frank.boerner · December 16, 2019, 4:17pm

Hello, everyone,
i’m developing a few smaller plugins, which sometimes perform time-consuming operations. for better feedback i’d like to use an HTMLDialog. (only a small page with a progressbar and/or some text, which can be accessed via scripts)
When I initialize the functions, I want to start the HTML dialog and then run an update function at regular intervals.
Unfortunately only the empty dialog opens each time and the function runs through completely, only after that the content of the dialog is displayed…
how can I determine / wait for the completeness of the HTML dialog in the initialization process, in order to continue with the execution of the actual function afterwards?
I would be very grateful for helpful tips,

Greetings from Germany,
Frank

john_drivenupthewall · December 16, 2019, 5:44pm

any progress bar will slow down the execution of your code…

but, you could update this old WebDialog one of mine to HtmlDialog to have a play yourself…

jcb_cube.rb (4.3 KB)

john

DanRathbun · December 16, 2019, 6:11pm

In the past most attempts at using WebDialogs / HtmlDialogs for a progress bar have failed.

This is why we’ve asked for a UI class to do this for many years. A formal discussion of this feature request is here in the API issue tracker …

github.com/SketchUp/api-issue-tracker

UI::ProgressBar

opened 10:07AM - 22 Oct 19 UTC

kengey

enhancement Ruby API SketchUp ui

Sketchup is lacking a native ProgressBar we developers could use to indicate pro…gress of a long running task (and perhaps even allow the user the cancel a running task). Also, Sketchup on its own could benefit from an indication of progress as well. I understand this should need some more information and propositions of how this could be implemented. But, to get started, let's have this topic in the issue tracker and collaborate on this. A few notes already: 1. progress should be tied to an `Operation` (ideally, just like in Revit for example, Model changes that happen outside of an `Operation`, or `Transaction` in the case of Revit, simply throw an error, see https://www.revitapidocs.com/2020/308ebf8d-d96d-4643-cd1d-34fffcea53fd.htm for more info on the Revit `Transaction` class). Maybe it is time for a dedicated `Sketchup::Operation` class. 1. it should be possible for users to cancel a long running task. Only by taking the 2 points here above into consideration I imagine a `Sketchup::Operation` class that would allow you to start, commit or abort it as well as to cancel (but not `abort` just yet) it, see if it has been cancelled and also to get and set progress. Since a model can have only 1 operation active, that would create the need for a `Model.active_operation` method, returning the current open operation, if any. Again, this is not structured, and should more be seen as a vague idea. The TLDR here is that we need a unified and backed by sketchup way to indicate progress to our users.

tt_su · December 17, 2019, 11:28am

The HtmlDialog still is blocked by the main thread as there’s process synchronization happening there that will be blocked.