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In my main window, I have a button that generates a report. But the report takes about 15 seconds to build, so I simply want to put up a small dialog that asks the user to "Please wait". It then just goes away when the report window is activated. The below works except that the "Please wait" dialog only produces the shell of the window, no content. Here is the code:

WD_PleaseWaitDialog _pWait = null; private void ReportButton_Click( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e ) { _pWait = new WD_PleaseWaitDialog(); _pWait.Show(); ReportWindow reportWindow = new ReportWindow(); // takes 15 seconds to execute reportWindow.Activated += closePleaseWaitWindow; reportWindow.Show(); } private void closePleaseWaitWindow( object sender, System.EventArgs e ) { _pWait.Close(); }
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Thank you all for your answers. This is a great site and has provided me with lots of good info. This is what works, but it does not seem as elegant as I would like it to be:

private void ReportButton_Click( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e ) { reportWindow = new BackUp.ReportWindow(); StatusBarTextBox.Text = "Generating report for \"" + DestinationDirectoryTextBox.Text + "\""; StartWork(); } // END ReportButton_Click private void StartWork() { _pWait = new WD_PleaseWaitDialog(); _pWait.Show(); BackgroundWorker worker = new BackgroundWorker(); worker.DoWork += DoWork; worker.RunWorkerCompleted += WorkerCompleted; worker.RunWorkerAsync(); } private void DoWork( object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e ) { reportWindow.initializeReportWindow( _dailyList, _weeklyList, _monthlyList, _semiAnnualList ); } private void WorkerCompleted( object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e ) { _pWait.Close(); reportWindow.Show(); }

With this approach, I had to move the ReportWindow initialization out of the constructor and move it to an accessor.

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Use dispatcher.begininvoke to generate and show report

Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(new Action(()=>{ /* report window */ });
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That does not solve the issue, since all you're doing here is calling into the main thread from the main thread... (which is odd in itself). The rendering of WD_PleaseWaitDialog will still get blocked by the lengthy operation in ReportWindow.
Issue is that waitdialog is not displayed. This solve the issue, because it will start long running process after waitdialog is rendered.
No, he did not say that the dialog is not displayed. He said that the contents of the dialog are not displayed. Those are completely two different things. Your code does nothing more than if he would just create an instance of the dialog and Show() it, which he has done. Do you even know what Dispatcher.BeginInvoke() does? It does not appear so.
Well, from your answer I'm pretty sure you don't know exactly what it does. At least show some respect.
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke adds work to dispatcher queue. The difference is, that it will run in next dispatcher loop. That means after the waitdialog content is rendered.
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What's happening is that your WD_PleaseWaitDialog gets instantiated and when you Show() it, it goes into Loaded state, but that's right before Rendered lifetime state. This is when you are creating your ReportWindow, which takes a while to process (15 seconds according to you). What's happening is that you're essentially blocking the main thread during that time, which prevents WD_PleaseWaitDialog from completing its rendering phase of its lifetime cycle. By the time your ReportWindow finishes its loading, both of them get rendered, but it's so quick that you may not see the content of the WD_PleaseWaitDialog at all before it's closed.

There are a couple of things you can do...

  • You might try working with the ContentRendered event of the WD_PleaseWaitDialog in order to proceed with the rest of the code. But, that couples the two windows... and that's not something I personally prefer.

  • You may consider using different threads. Task class can greatly help you in this. One way this may be done is to put lengthy operations in your ReportWindow into a Task:

    Task.Run(() => { // lengthy operation here });

When you're done with the operation, you'll need to call back into the main thread to close your WD_PleaseWaitDialog (since you can't handle UI operations in other threads):

Application.Current.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke( Dispatcher.Normal, new Action(_pWait.Close));

I'm not going to provide you the whole code unless you get really stuck. Try to do it yourself, since I've given you plenty of information to get started. Hope that helps.

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