topic Re: Entiy usage in separate thread. in .NET Forum

Entiy usage in separate thread.

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 23:32:57 GMT

Hello

Recently I faced with the following problem:

I want user to select some Entities and than perform with them some calculations. But calculations are time consuming and I decided to move them to separate thread. But when calculations are performed in background thread AutoCAD UI is available and user can edit/remove any of selected Entities.

The question: Is it possible to

1) Forbid user to edit drawing while calculation is performed, or . . .

2) Make drawing-independent copies of Entities, or . . .

3) Continue calculations even if drawing was closed?

I've already tried MdiActiveDocument.DocumentLock()

and

Entity.Clone() and tackle about Entity.DeepClone() but still didn't find a solution.

Thanks for attention.

Re: Entiy usage in separate thread.

chiefbraincloud — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 22:42:06 GMT

To my knowledge, you can not use the managed API from a separate thread (I think even if you are using COM, the calls to the AutoCAD COM interface would still execute under AutoCAD's thread). It is for that reason that I have not played around with threading very much.

If I am mis-interpreting what you are trying to do, and you know for a fact that your separate thread will work, then I am pretty sure there is a mechanism for managing the thread and waiting for it to complete before returning, which would keep the ACAD UI unavailable to the user.

Re: Entiy usage in separate thread.

Anonymous — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 23:22:45 GMT

But I've did a lot of work, to move all calculations to a separate thread. Now I have 3 threads: 1) Acad main GUI thread 2) Calculation GUI thread 3) Calculation thread

During my calculations I don't need entire Entity, just its boundary representation and I do only Read operations. May be there is sense to create some drawing-independent wrappers around Entity and Brep?