Update display after regaining focus

[Billy Scherz]

I have a program that displays current time and date in a header, the display rolls past midnight most of the time. If the DOS box does not have focus when the SLEEPER routine returns between 23:59:50 and 00:00:00 the time and date will not update until a key is pressed. Any other time the time is updated after the focus is regained. This is loop that updates the time.

DO
c.SystemDate = Date2Num(QDATE("U"), "")
Call DisplayHeader
SLEEPER 10
Ky$ = UCASE$(INKEY$)
LOOP WHILE Ky$ = "" or INSTR(ValidKeys$, Ky$) = 0

TIA

[Alan Earnshaw]

What is SLEEPER? It is not part of the PowerBASIC language, so if you can post the code to that routine, we might be able to help you.

You can take a different approach and use ON TIMER instead:

ON TIMER(10) GOSUB UpdateTime
TIMER ON
' do your program's work here
TIMER OFF
END

UpdateTime:
  c.SystemDate = Date2Num(QDATE("U"), "")
  Call DisplayHeader
  RETURN

Alan


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Alan C. Earnshaw
Information Management Systems, Inc.

[Billy Scherz]

Alan,
Here is the sleeper code, some of the testing I've done indicate there may be a problem in sleeper, when it doesn't have the focus from 23:59:50 to 0:00:00.

SUB Sleeper (Seconds AS SINGLE) PUBLIC
csPush "Sleeper"
DIM t AS SINGLE,NewT AS SINGLE
'This will wait the exact amount of time, unlike
IF Seconds! >=0 THEN 'SLEEP which, under a multi-user setting, will
t!=TIMER 'not work correctly or even consistantly
NewT! = (t!+Seconds!) MOD %MaxSeconds
WHILE t! < NewT! AND NOT INSTAT
CALL ScreenSaver (FALSE)
t!=TIMER
WEND
ELSE
'? "Pausing...Press A Key To Continue . . ."
'WHILE INKEY$="" : WEND
END IF
csPop "Sleeper"
END SUB


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[This message has been edited by Billy Scherz (edited April 10, 2000).]

[Tom Hanlin]

You've got a problem here:

  t!=TIMER 'not work correctly or even consistantly
  NewT! = (t!+Seconds!) MOD %MaxSeconds
  WHILE t! < NewT! AND NOT INSTAT

Consider what happens to NewT! when the current time, plus
Seconds!, goes past midnight. Due to the MOD, NewT! rolls over
to a low number, but t! is still a high number. So, your loop
never gets executed.

[Billy Scherz]

Tom,
That does explain some debugging output I was getting, I don't see how that would affect the date and time update when the program does not have the focus.

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[Lance Edmonds]

Billy, you need to post more of the code in your initial posting... it is not shown how this code actually loops.

BTW, does the display update correctly at other times when the DOS window does not have focus? You are not very clear on what *exactly* happens, and we can only guess unless we can see the remainder of the code.

FYI, when a DOS app is windowed, the screen display is only updated by Windows periodically - this may have some effect on your display. However, in full-screen mode you should not see any such "delay" in the screen update.

Additionally, you may want to consider releasing time slices to Windows in your "do nothing" loops. If you check through this forum, you should find the code that does this with an interrupt call (I'm not at my DEV PC to dig the code up and post it).


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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Billy Scherz]

Lance,
The program updates after it regains the focus except for over midnight, the loop displays a menu. I found the code you mentioned I haven't had a chance to test it yet.

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[Billy Scherz]

I inserted the asm code into our sleeper function. The testing I've completed so far shows it does update past midnight now, but also updates the time without the program having the focus.

Thanks

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