How to ensure that only one hiRegTimer process is running at any one time

B,

You can't - hiRegTimer doesn't offer the ability to do this. However, you might want to consider using my CCStimer package that provides a more convenient interface and introduces the idea of having job IDs, being able to specify repeating jobs, and also provides a mechanism to terminate scheduled jobs given their job ID. It uses hiRegTimer underneath, but also allows you to schedule closures and function objects which can be useful too.

Of course, you still have to use this wisely because everything is still single-threaded and so you don't want to be scheduling code that takes a lot of resources on a frequent basis.

Here's my article: How to schedule a repeating function with a timer in SKILL

Andrew

Thanks Andrew, adding use-case below in case you might know of an easier means of implementing?

A procedure that allows the user to toggle off the visibility of “Boundary”, “FigGroup” and “Custom Placement Area” objects to allow the user more visual clarity when viewing larger/top level layouts. After 5 minutes the visibility of these objects automatically switch back on again.

I had been using hiRegTimer within this procedure to do this (as below), however resulting the aforementioned issue when called multiple times. Is there another means by which such a delay in turning back on the Object vis could be achieved? Reading the code you provided it sounds like it can freeze the interface if ran for any considerable length of time, if I understand correctly?

hiRegTimer("AutoOnImproveVis()" 3000)

Hi,

Can't you use a global variable to set a timestamp?

Everytime your procedure is called, you check the previous timestamp, deduce what to do accordingly

Then you reset the timestamp using current time

The associated functions you might want to check: getCurrentTime compareTime timeToString 

Hope this helps,

Aurélien

Thanks Aurélien, appreciated, B

blankman said:

A procedure that allows the user to toggle off the visibility of “Boundary”, “FigGroup” and “Custom Placement Area” objects to allow the user more visual clarity when viewing larger/top level layouts. After 5 minutes the visibility of these objects automatically switch back on again.

This sounds (to me) a very odd use model (and personally I'd think that could be pretty annoying that it suddenly changes back 5 minutes later when you're in the middle of doing something, or have wandered over to a colleague to bring them over to show them what you've seen - and it changed while you were away!). However, if you really want to do this - then using hiRegTimer or my CCStimer makes sense - not sure there's any other real way.

blankman said:

I had been using hiRegTimer within this procedure to do this (as below), however resulting the aforementioned issue when called multiple times. Is there another means by which such a delay in turning back on the Object vis could be achieved? Reading the code you provided it sounds like it can freeze the interface if ran for any considerable length of time, if I understand correctly?

You could easily use the CCStimer for this - keeping track of a global handle when this is scheduled and then if called again you could terminate the current "job" and reschedule again (updating the global handle to the latest registered timer).

The "freeze the interface for any considerable length of time" bit is just saying that you should be cautious if you are running something very frequently and the callback you're calling takes a long time to execute (that doesn't seem likely to be the case from what you've described).

Andrew

Thanks very much Andrew, appreciated, I will take a closer look at CCStimer (have not had a lot of time on my hands lately). Kind regards, B