Need help with Backgroundworker

Question

Hi,

Need help on how to use .Net's Backgroundworker thread for the following purpose to increase UI responsiveness and performance in my .Net winforms application.Since am new to .Net/C#, any code would be helpful.

When user clicks "Calculate" button in UI form,

1.Get a list of categories C from database[this is typically around 10]

2.For each category C, do the following:

a.Call a third-party library, do some processing and calculate category price.

b.Get a list of products[This is typically around 800].

c.For each product, calculate its price using its category price from above.

d.Update this price of each product back in the database using a stored proc.

3.Update the progress back[or report any error message] to a form in UI.

I want to use Backgroundworker for steps #c and #d above. So, where do I make a call to InitializeBackgroundworker and RunWorkerAsync?

Also, how do I make sure these 2 methods get called for each category?

Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

Doing this in .NET is pretty simple - just write a method that will do the processing you want (and make sure it doesn't touch anything on the UI), and then pass that function to the background worker - or directly to

ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(methodName)

Example function

function void methodName(object state)
{
    // Go get your Categories

    // Loop through Categories

    // Call third party library

    // Get list of products

    // Calculate price and update database
}

The BackgroundWorker does make it a little easier to update the UI from a background thread, but you can handle this your self by using the ISynchronizeInvoke interface.