Are there any restrictions or special requirements when calling a method in a backgroundWorker DoWork section? - backgroundworker

This question is related to direction provided to me in another post (see How can I stop a method using a Cancel button in visual C#?). My question, is whether there are any restrictions when creating a BackgroundWorker, as far as called methods are concerned? I have a method that executes fine outside the DoWork section of my BackgroundWorker, but the moment it is placed inside the DoWork, I get a Cross Thread error stating "Cross-thread operation not valid: Control "txtFileOutput" accessed from a thread other than the thread it was created on." I know the BackgroundWorker is working with a basic for loop and have validated that. The "txtFileOutput" control referenced in the error is a textbox, to which I'm piping output from a regex query against a file (this is the method I'm trying to call within the DoWork).

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Signalr - Serialize callback as event not a function call?

In Signalr, is there any support for having events instead of callbacks.
Let me explain before you grab your pitchforks.
In following with the first example here
Clients.All.addContosoChatMessageToPage(name, message);
Wouldn't call a hub proxy's addContosoChatMessageToPage(name, message), but would dispatch a addContosoChatMessageToPage event with some extra information. (not asking that it be the same api call exactly)
The reason I'm asking all of this is because
This works much better alongside functional reactive programming frameworks like ELM and bacon.js
I don't want to do this myself and essentially create my own sub-framework. Of course I could always do Clients.All.CreateEvent(name,params...) where I'm continually calling back my method to do this event creation
I actually think events work better in some scenarios for separation of concerns.
Am I crazy? does something like this exist?
This is already supported. If you don't want to do the dispatching yourself and you know the name of the "event" or "method" at runtime you can do this:
IClientProxy proxy = Clients.All;
proxy.Invoke(name, args);
This lets you write code where you may not know the name of the event you're trying to callback on the client at compile time.

custom validator against remote object

I have a need to validate a field against our database to verify unique-ness. The problem I seem to be having is that the validators doValidation() exits before we've heard back from database.
How can I have the validator wait to return its payload until after we've heard from the DB?
Or perhaps a better question might be (since I think the first question is impossible), how can I set this up differently, so that I don't need to wait, or so that the wait doesn't cause the validation to automaticallly return valid?
If you're using a remote object, you can specify the method call inside your remote declaration and assign a function to the result call. The result call only runs once the remote server returns something, so it won't be run before your validation.
Do your validation call in said result function call (which you will have to create) and you should be good. Your code should go something like this:
<s:RemoteObject id="employeeService"
destination="ColdFusion"
source="f4iaw100.remoteData.employeeData"
endpoint="http://adobetes.com/flex2gateway/"
result="employeeService_resultHandler(event)"/>
**<s:method name="dataCheckCall" result="dataCheckResult(event)"/>**
<s:RemoteObject />
And in your script:
function protected dataCheckResult(event:ResultEvent):void {
**doValidate();**
}
Edit: As soon as you call "dataCheckCall" the method will start running. If, for whatever reason, you want to call this WITHIN your validator, you can do so, and then dataCheckResult will run whenever it returns with it's payload (pretend doValidate is called elsewhere). I've left a message below as well.
You are trying to fit an asynchronous process (fetching data from a DB) into a synchronous process (checking all the validators in turn).
This won't work...
You'll need to either roll your own validator framework, or use a different method of determining the legality of your controls.
P.S. The MX validators are rubbish anyway!
What I've managed to do, seems to work, mostly. I don't like it, but it at least performs the validation against the remote source.
What I've done, then, is to use an 'keyUp' event handler to spin off the database lookup portion. In the meanwhile, I set up a string variable to act as some kind of a Flag, which'll be marked as 'processing'. When the response event fires, I'll examine its contents, and either clear the flag, or set it to some kind of other error.
Then, I have created a new 'EmptyStringValidator' will check the contents of this flag, and do its job accordingly.
Its indirect, but, so far, seems to work.

Flex's FileReference.save() can only be called in a user event handler -- how can I get around this?

I need to call FileReference.save() after a web service call has completed, but this method has a restriction: "In Flash Player, you can only call this method successfully in response to a user event (for example, in an event handler for a mouse click or keypress event). Otherwise, calling this method results in Flash Player throwing an Error exception." (from the documentation here)
This restriction is a bit vague. Does it mean that I can only call the FileReference.save() method from within an event handler function that is registered as a listener for certain types of user events? If so then exactly which user events are valid? (Perhaps there's an event that will never be dispatched by user interaction with my application and I could register an event handler function for that event type and make the save() call from within that function?)
My difficulty is that I can't safely call the FileReference.save() method until my web service returns with the data that will be used as the argument of the FileReference.save() method call, so the event that triggers the FileReference.save() call is actually a ResultEvent rather than a user event, and I'm leery of dispatching a new (faux) user event type in order to be able to trigger the FileReference.save() call unless it's definitely a user event that would never be dispatched as a result of actual user interaction with my application.
In a nutshell what I'm doing now is this: I have a function that is registered as a handler for a button click. In this function I make my web service call to fetch data from the server. I also have a result handler function which gets invoked when the web service call completes, and it's in here that I want to call the FileReference.save() method since it's at this point that I know that the data is ready to be saved to a file. But the aforementioned restriction is blocking me from doing this -- I get an error:
Error #2176: Certain actions, such as those that display a pop-up window,
may only be invoked upon user interaction, for example by a mouse click
or button press.
I've tried many things to get around this such as creating a second mouse click event handler function with the FileReference.save() call within and calling it after a timeout interval (to give the web service time to complete), but I keep running into the same error -- maybe that approach doesn't work since the second function isn't registered as an event listener for the event type used as its argument.
I'm new to Flex development so perhaps I'm just not thinking about this in the right way. If anyone can suggest another approach I'd really appreciate it. Thanks in advance for your comments or suggestions.
--James
Adobe does this as a sort of security measure to ensure users are the ones messing with files rather than potentially harmful code. My understanding is that they enforce this by only allowing handlers of (click?) events that originate from UI components to execute the FileReference methods, so generating your own events programmatically will not work, although I have not tried to verify this. Unfortunately the best resolution I've found is to re-work the UI a bit to conform to this constraint. In your particular situation, you could make this a two click process with a button that says something like "Prepare Download", which changes to "Download File" after the web service is complete. This is less than ideal from a user perspective, but I don't think there's much else that can be done unless you can somehow complete your web service call prior to displaying the button that triggers the FileReference.save() call.
After struggling for that for well, a couple hours I found a workaround: you can use both mouseDown AND mouseUp events instead of just click.
For instance:
s:Button
mouseDown="prepare_PDF()"
mouseUp="save_PDF()"
Works fine for me!
Happy coding!
--Thomas
As a workaround I used the ExternalInterface class. I created a javascript function with this code
function downloadFile (url) {
window.open(url);
}
An in AS3 I call
var url = 'www.example.com/downloadfile.php?file_id=xxx';
ExternalInterface.call('downloadAttachmentFile', url);
So with that I transfer the file handling to JS/HTML.
This is a comment on Thomas' answer (I don't have enough XP to comment yet): The mousedown and mouseup workaround works nicely. Just a note that if you make any changes in prepare_PDF() that need 'undoing' in save_PDF(), then its a good idea to call that code on the mouseout event as well, since there might be a case that the user mousedown's on the button, but then moves the mouse away from the button.
This was particularly relevant for my case, in which we increase the size of a watermark on an image when the user clicks the download button (that triggers the .save() call). I reduce the size of the watermark down to normal on the mousedown and mouseout events.
I had this same issue, I chose to use flash.net methods. Call flash.net.navigateToURL(url); from an actionscript or navigateToURL(url); from mxml.
What i do to solve this is to show an alert message with an anonymous function so i don't have to create a button.
Alert.show("Do you wish to download the file?", "Confirm", Alert.OK | Alert.CANCEL, this, function (eventObj:CloseEvent):void {
if (eventObj.detail == Alert.OK) {
fileReference.save(zipOut.byteArray, dateFormater_titulo.format(new Date ()) + ".zip");
}//if
}/*function*/, null, Alert.OK);

How to determine currently processed event in ActionScript?

When one call Clipboard.generalClipboard.getData() in ActionScript outside of Event.PASTE processing function it fails with following message
The Clipboard.generalClipboard object may only be read while processing a flash.events.Event.PASTE event.
Even if I dispatch Event.PASTE event and call this function within event handler it still fails.
How does it determine which event is currently being processed?
you need to lister for the real paste Event from the stage and not simulate it. This is a security issue so flash apps do not read your global clipboard data, only on user paste action.

Flex/Flash: capture 'trace' in code?

In Flash/Flex, is it possible to capture the result of 'trace' in code?
So, for example, if one part of the code calls trace("foo"), I'd like to automatically capture the string "foo" and pass it to some other function.
Edit: I'm not interested in trying to use trace instead of a proper logging framework… I want to write a plugin for FlexUnit, so when a test fails it can say something like: "Test blah failed. Here is the output: ... traced text ...".
Edit 2: I only want to capture the results of trace. Or, in other words, even though my code uses a proper logging framework, I want to handle gracefully code that's still using trace for logging.
As far as I know it's impossible to do it externally, google brings up no results. Have you considered creating a variable for the output and then adding that to the log, eg:
var outputtext = "text";
trace(outputtext);
// log outputtext here
Disregard if it isn't feasible, but I can't think of any other way.
However you can do it internally, if it's just for development purposes: http://broadcast.artificialcolors.com/index.php?c=1&more=1&pb=1&tb=1&title=logging_flash_trace_output_to_a_text_fil
If you want to write traces to a log, you can just use the Debug version of Flash Player and tell it to log traces.
I have a Debug.write method that sends the passed messages over a LocalConnection which I use that instead of trace. My requirement is to be able to capture the debug statements even when the SWF is running out of the authoring environment, but you can use this method to capture the trace messages.
As far as I understood you don't want to use logging, which is of course the right way to do it.
So, you can simply create a Static class with method trace, and call this method from anywhere in the application, that's how you will get all traces to one place, then could do what ever you want with the trace string before printing it to console.
Another way is to create bubbling trace event and dispatch it whenever you want to trace message, then add listener to STAGE for it and catch all events...
Hope its help
I would suggest looking through the source for the swiz framework. They use the flex internal logLogger app-wide and use best practices in a good majority of their code.

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