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[Solved] Lazarus Pascal - How to make a Delay/Sleep without locking up your application
Delphi, Lazarus, Free Pascal
(@hans)
Famed Member Admin
Joined: 11 years ago
Posts: 2663
Topic starter
February 10, 2019 4:52 AM
So I had to add a delay (better said: sleep) in my code, so that after displaying a temporary status message, would revert back to it's previous message. Kind-a like a brief bleep showing a notification and then going back to where we left off.
Now the sleep() function has a little problem ... it's totally locks your application (Zzz mouse, or spinning ball) and the user can't really do anything.
With a neat little trick you can do this better;
procedure MyDelay(DelayTickCount: DWORD);
var
StartTickCount : DWORD;
begin
StartTickCount := GetTickCount;
while (GetTickCount < StartTickCount + DelayTickCount) and (not Application.Terminated) do
Application.ProcessMessages;
end;
So this function does NOT lock you user interface, but does wait with the next steps for "DelayTickCount" milliseconds.
(@hans)
Famed Member Admin
Joined: 11 years ago
Posts: 2663
Topic starter
March 26, 2019 4:21 AM
Since the previous functions uses GetTickCount, which has its issues and GetTickCount64 appears a better choice, you may also want to consider the alternative below, which uses TDateTime instead, where we can set our delay in milliseconds (1000=1sec).
Note: uses the dateutils unit.
procedure MyDelay(milliSecondsDelay: int64);
var
stopTime : TDateTime;
begin
stopTime := IncMilliSecond(Now,milliSecondsDelay);
while (Now < stopTime) and (not Application.Terminated) do
Application.ProcessMessages;
end;
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