Thanks so much for the responses! Indeed calling nextEventMatchingMask... and sending the event manually worked.

Interesting info about the event loop being separate from (but linked to) the runloop.

Thanks again -- this was a lifesaver :)


On Jan 22, 2009, at 9:02 PM, Michael Ash wrote:

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 7:34 PM, Quincey Morris
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Jan 22, 2009, at 14:55, John Mikros wrote:

I'm working on a Cocoa application which does all of its work within an NSTimer callback that is called regularly. Events are handled normally
within a Cocoa run loop.

However, there are times when within the callback, the code enters an
inner loop, and will not exit until some user action is performed.
I'm trying to force the run loop to pump events within this inner loop,
but I can't seem to ever get it to work.

I use, from the timer callback:

      NSEvent *event;
      while (event = [NSApp nextEventMatchingMask: NSAnyEventMask
untilDate: nil inMode: NSEventTrackingRunLoopMode dequeue: YES])
              [NSApp sendEvent: event];


I don't know if this is officially blessed or not, but it certainly seems to
work just fine.

In the places I've done this, I was only really interested in making the mouse and keyboard work, hence NSEventTrackingRunLoopMode. You could use the
default run loop mode instead, I guess.

Yes, this is fine, and supported. It's a common way of implementing
mouse tracking instead of relying on the stateless mouseDragged:
method.

The reason you have to do this and can't just run the runloop is
because the event loop is actually a separate concept from the
runloop. It's a bit confusing because the event loop is implemented
using the runloop, but if you just run the runloop on the main thread,
events won't get processed. You have to explicitly run this in order
to get them to be processed.

Note that using the default runloop mode with this is generally a bad
idea. By running in the default mode you allow *everything* else to
run, which means that some other code might decide that *it* wants an
inner event loop as well. If you then want to quit before that other
code has finished, tough cookies. Much better to control things more
tightly by using a different runloop mode.

Mike
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