Not knowing what you're doing exactly, you could either try to find out the number of items to process and use the percentage of items processed to progress the bar, or use the size of the archive and the percentage already unpacked and dealt with.
Ronald Vogelaar -- http://www.rovosoft.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Theodore H. Smith Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 6:38 PM To: REALbasic NUG Subject: Progress bar with only partial knowledge of how long it will take I got a progress bar, for an operation. The operation has several sub operations. Unzip, analyse, cleanup. I'm trying to make the progress bar be smooth, so that it doesn't just jump past a quick unzip, and then really take ages during the analysis. But to do that, I need to know how long the analysis will take. The duration of the analysis is dependant on the size of the information that needs to be analysed. Now, to know how long the analysis will take, I need to unzip the data first. So, basically, I can't before hand know how long the analysis will take, but only during the main operation can I get a refined estimate of how long is left. I guess that's a bit like software development, you got a rough idea of how long it'll take, but only once you started doing enough work will you really know how long the job will take! So, what should I do? 1) Have a jumpy progress bar, when part of the bar whizzes by, but other parts of the bar crawl. 2) Not have a single progress bar, maybe some text saying what operation is being done, but not really give the idea that any one item has any proportion in size to any other part. (While more honest about our lack of knowledge, this doesn't inform the user any more.) 3) Refine the progress bar during the operation, so that it could actually take a step *downwards*, if after unzipping, the amount of data to process turns out to be quite high. This could break user confidence in the progress bar though, it shouldn't really jump down. 4) Try to fudge it. Unzip just the files we need, ahead of time, and then judge how long the analysis will take, before unzipping the other files. Unfortunately, this means that we must do some work before knowing how much time is left. It's starting to lean back towards the "jumpy progress bar" situation. Ideas anyone? _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html> _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
