Workflow: Add a single-step mode, also change Play to Stop for long-running analyses (eg check interference)

[rmcanany]

[farfilli]

I'm not sure to understand what's an add single event is. Can you elaborate it a bit?

[rmcanany]

I'm working on a long-ish animation. It would be nice in debugging to be able to single-step through the events to see where things are going wrong.

[farfilli]

Ok, I got it, if you already have an idea on how to implement it go on. I imagine a single step button play and each time you press it you move forward one step at a time.
A step selection should be implemented to choose witch to play

[rmcanany]

Can do.

[rmcanany]

For single stepping, I would like to step backwards with CTRL-Click. How is that done?

    Private Sub BT_Step_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles BT_Step.Click
        IsSingleStep = True

        If CurrentEvent = FLP_Events.Controls.Count Then
            CurrentEvent = 1
        Else
            CurrentEvent += 1
        End If

    End Sub

[rmcanany]

Never mind about CTRL-Click. Google knew all about it.

[farfilli]

I found out that the STOP button doesn't work, I think it's time to introduce a background worker to separate the user interface from the workflow events. In this way everything will be smooth and nice.

Note: Why use a background worker? A background worker will run in a separate thread and will not hold the UI thread that will still be responsible. Background worker should not do any UI manipulation but only calculations, in our case, will do the Solid Edge work. At each step the BG worker will do a report that will update the UI.

If you have a look at the UC_Slider.vb the play is done by a BG worker.

[rmcanany]

I like the BG worker idea. I'll let you have that one. 😃 😃

The STOP button is working for me, but it is sluggish. Also, it can appear not to work because it completes the remaining steps in the event before exiting. I might change that.

[farfilli]

I will take a look when have some time, thanks 😅

[farfilli]

I have committed an initial test to implement BW, but unfortunately, the setting of a variable value always fails with an error.
I have seen a comment from you about this problem; did you investigate when it occurs? This line

BW can be disabled by commenting these lines in the workflow

[rmcanany]

You're fast!

I haven't found where the variable is getting changed outside the limits yet. I flagged that line to point out one possible place to look. Haven't investigated any further.

Looking forward to seeing how to do a background worker. Housekeeper really needs that, too.

[farfilli]

Once you understand how it works it's pretty neat.
The main thing to keep in mind for everything to work smoothly is to keep separate UI and Job threads.
BW report progress is the bridge between the threads that will take care of updating the UI when needed.

Keep UI and JOB separate will also need to keep UI displayed values and Job values separated

[farfilli]

Ok, I found out the "problem", if you manually set the limits in a variable slider, those limits are then inserted in the variable table interval. In a workflow event, you should not exceed those limits.
A workflow event variable value input validation is needed to avoid the user inserting out-of-range values.