Thanks to all that posted.
To the original poster:
How much experience do you have with threads? I'm a little
confused reading
through your posts, I can't tell if you are familiar with pthreads,
and just
need to figure out NSThreads, or if you have no threading
experience at all.
As I said earlier on, I don't have ANY experience with threading at
all - this was my first attempt to try and understand how to implement
a threading scheme. The Apple documentation was my first port of call
and at least the basics of it, I got from those articles. I found a
great deal of reading material online however I think the noise of
hearing the same comments "Threading is hard ..." etc made this all
the more difficult. This mailing list has in one day at least, given
me some clear guidance on my next approach which I really appreciate.
At some point though, to take things out of the theoretical, you have
to put things into practice. Granted my approach may have been very
hit and miss but it certainly accelerated my learning!
to have a pool of worker threads that render the
thumbnails/PDFviews in the background. It would simply be a matter
of
having a thread-safe priority queue (so if the user clicks on a
thumbnail,
it gets jumped to the head of the queue), and let the threads grab
whatever
happens to be the highest priority to work on, returning the
results to the
main thread to display later. Alternatively, each time you click
on a
thumbnail, it could spawn a thread, with the thread returning the
results to
the main thread when it is done.
This idea is exactly what I was trying to achieve - The idea of the
thumbnail creation and the PDF loading happening in a separate thread.
However to have a thread safe priority queue to organize the "Worker
Threads" sounds like the missing link - And with that some safe way to
cancel Threads that have been outdated by the user before that Thread
had time to set the PDF View! I am assuming in a priority queue this
function could exist?
Nothing prevents you from rendering to an offscreen bitmap context
in a thread and then feeding that image back to a main view (it's
actually fairly simple since all you need to coordinate is the
"take the next job from the queue"/"put the result on another
queue" which are fairly straight forward threading exercises). I
use this exact technique to prove a "media browser" like view and
it works quite well (and I wouldn't be surprised if IKImageBrowser
didn't do the same).
Rendering to an offscreen bitmap (in another thread) is also another
idea I haven't thought much about - it sounds very cool. At least the
Thumbnail creation component could be worked out fairly easily. Its
the loading of the PDF's themselves that still concerns me. Does
anyone know whether there is a way to get progress info from a PDF
loading into a view - percentage/bytes loaded for example?
Synchronizing the PDF, it's associated thumbnail and the list in the
Table View, appears to be my main problem with regard to threading. An
Indexing scheme of some sort does appear to be the best solution to
prevent the crashes I'm currently experiencing.
Cheers
Karl
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