progress counters and dialogs

I recently had a colleague ask me how to pop up a progress bar dialog to indicate to a user the percentage complete of a process. I did not know how to answer that at first... Smallworld has historically not used progress bar dialogs as much as some users would expect. So I will present two options for showing progress status.

Text-based process

If you have some kind of text based process use progress_counter...

_block
 _local some_collection << rope.new(20)

 # create a progress_counter class that reports every 5
 # increments.  Because we know some_collection.size we can also
 # estimate completion time
 _local pc << progress_counter.new_on_count(5,some_collection.size)
 
 _for idx,an_el _over some_collection.fast_keys_and_elements()
 _loop
  # the write() and sleep() statements are here to make a simple
  # example...
  write(an_el)
  _thisthread.sleep(1000)

  # ... but the :next() method is important to let the
  # progress_counter (aka PC) know that you have completed one
  # iteration of the loop.
  pc.next()
 _endloop
_endblock
$
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Done 5 (15 left) time taken  5 seconds 297 milliseconds  (ETC. 15 seconds 891 milliseconds ) average rate 0.9439305267
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Done 10 (10 left) time taken 10 seconds 625 milliseconds  (ETC. 10 seconds 625 milliseconds ) average rate 0.9411844826
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Done 15 (5 left) time taken 15 seconds 812 milliseconds  (ETC.  5 seconds 270 milliseconds ) average rate 0.9487724325
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Done 20 (0 left) time taken 21 seconds 15 milliseconds  (ETC.  0 milliseconds ) average rate 0.9562876356

... you can also ask the progress_counter to report at a given time interval...

_block
  _local some_collection << rope.new(20)

  # create a progress_counter class that reports every 2
  # seconds. Because we know some_collection.size we can also
  # estimate completion time
  _local pc << progress_counter.new_on_time(3,some_collection.size)
 
  _for idx,an_el _over some_collection.fast_keys_and_elements()
  _loop
   # the write() and sleep() statements are here to make a simple
   # example...
   write(an_el)
   _thisthread.sleep(1000)
  
   # ... but the :next() method is important to let the
   # progress_counter (aka PC) know that you have completed one
   # iteration of the loop.
   pc.next()
  _endloop
_endblock
$
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Done 3 (17 left) time taken  3 seconds 125 milliseconds  (ETC. 17 seconds 708 milliseconds ) average rate 0.9600000000
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Done 6 (14 left) time taken  6 seconds 250 milliseconds  (ETC. 14 seconds 583 milliseconds ) average rate 0.9600000000
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Done 9 (11 left) time taken  9 seconds 359 milliseconds  (ETC. 11 seconds 439 milliseconds ) average rate 0.9616468318
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Done 12 (8 left) time taken 12 seconds 453 milliseconds  (ETC.  8 seconds 291 milliseconds ) average rate 0.9648530373
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Done 15 (5 left) time taken 15 seconds 578 milliseconds  (ETC.  5 seconds 199 milliseconds ) average rate 0.9616468318
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Done 18 (2 left) time taken 18 seconds 703 milliseconds  (ETC.  2 seconds 81 milliseconds ) average rate 0.9612351238
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Done 20 (0 left) time taken 20 seconds 765 milliseconds  (ETC.  0 milliseconds ) average rate 0.9612351238

If you want to use a more user-friendly indicator, use the progress_indicator_dialog. It is loaded into the core 4.1 image and you can find details about it in the header of product/modules/sw_core/progress_manager/source/progress_indicator_dialog.magik

_block
 _local q << progress_indicator_dialog.new ( "Generating" )
 q.interrupt_handler << handler.new ( _unset, _unset )
 q.info_string << "The current series will contain approx 10 frames."
 q.bar_label << "Generating frames..."
 q.image << { :help, _unset }
 q.activate ()

 q.max_count << 10

 _for n _over range(1,10,1)
 _loop
  _thisthread.sleep(1000)

  q.progress_changed(n)
 _endloop
_endblock
$

And there you have it... easy ways to let your users know the progress of a process.

Smallworld 2007 Americas Users Conference dates

The Smallworld 2007 Americas Users Conference dates have been set for September 9-12. You can read the announcement here.

Magik OLE Excel Reporting Performance Enhancements

I recently received a question about how to speed up Magik reporting to Excel using the OLE functionality. I you have ever used OLE from Magik to access other APIs you will know that it is a powerful but not overly fast way of connecting to 3rd party applications.

The questioner had indicated that they were writing data from Magik to Excel one cell at a time and then formatting each cell individually, too. While this is a logical way of doing a report it was taking a very long time to create a typical customer report.

My suggestions to improve data transfer and formatting performance were:

• If your report is basically a row report, then you can copy one row at a time onto the Windows text clipboard in Magik. Then you can use an OLE call on Excel to paste the copied text into a range of cells. Be sure that the copied text has a delimiter that Excel can parse on. That way you can pass a large amount of data from Magik to Excel with a single OLE call.

_block
 _constant delim_char << tab_char
 _local a_frame << smallworld_product.applications.an_element().top_frame

 # using a text output stream will let you cleanly create
 # a delimited string later on.
 _local temp_stream << internal_text_output_stream.new()

 _for a_record _over records.fast_elements()
 _loop
  # using OLE, set your cell range...

  data_list {a_record.attr1,a_record.attr2,a_record.attr3}
  temp_stream.reset()
  temp_stream.write_list_with_separator(data_list,delim_char)

  a_frame.clipboard_text << temp_stream.string

  # using OLE, do a "Paste" into the current cell
 _endloop
_endblock
$

• As for formatting: is there similar formatting for a row or column of cells? If there is, then keep track of how many rows or columns you have as you are copying/pasting the data into Excel. Then, once you have finished getting the data into Excel, format a range of columns or a range of rows or a range of cells that require common formatting. Again, that way you do the formatting with a minimum number of OLE calls
• Have you looked at the Smallworld Explorer “Export to Excel” functionality? I think that core code (4.0 SWAF) might make use of an Excel template.
• see collection_export_engine.export_to_excel