Title: Doing work while application is Idle
Question: How do I have my application perform work when it is idle?
Answer:
You can create an OnIdle event to be called whenever your
application is waiting for messages to be processed. Simply
declare the event handler procedure in the private section of
the forms declaration:
{ Private declarations }
procedure IdleEventHandler(Sender: TObject; var Done: Boolean);
In the implementation section, define the procedure:
procedure TForm1.IdleEventHandler(Sender: TObject;
var Done: Boolean);
begin
{Do a small bit of work here}
Done := false;
end;
Then assign the Application's OnIdle event to point to your
new procedure(You may do this whereever you like, but a good
place would be the Forms OnCreate method):
Application.OnIdle := IdleEventHandler;
OnIdle is called only once, as the application transitions into
an idle state. It is not called continuiously unless Done is
set to False. If Done is False, WaitMessage is not called.
Applications that set Done to False consume an inordinate
amount of CPU time that affects overall system performance.
You can set the boolean variable "done" to true when you want
to stop the event handler from executing.