C# treeview threadsafe operations

Question

Hello, I am looking for information on using a treeview in safethread manner. Does any one have experance with this or know of some online links to research.

Thanks

Answer 1

From the MSDN documentation on System.Windows.Forms.TreeView:

Any public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe. Any instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe.

Fortunately for you, there is a mechanism in Windows Forms to handle controls from multiple threads in a thread safe way:

public delegate void TreeActionDelegate(WhatToDo details);

public void DoSomethingWithThisTree(WhatToDo details)
{
    // Assuming that 'this' points to a TreeView
    if (this.InvokeRequired) this.Invoke(new TreeActionDelegate(),
        new object[] { details });
    else
    {
        // The body of your function
    }
}

Now you can invoke this function from any thread:

DoSomethingWithThisTree(new WhatToDo("something"));

This will guarantee that the code that manipulates your tree will be executed in the thread that created the TreeView, hence it will be thread-safe. If you don't want to inherit from TreeView, you can just use treeInstance.InvokeRequired and treeInstance.Invoke().

Answer 2

Thanks...

the line "//the body of your function" gave me a kick start.

I have allways approched this with just passing some information to GUI object by this method...I never thought to place the whole body of the function in there

Thanks

Brad