macOS NSNotification and NSView problem???

[MayPeng]

Hello everyone,
I am a freshman, and I am trying to make a mac application to upgrade some device, and get into trouble now. Here's the question:

The project has a main window, which binds to the AppDelegate Controller; And has two threads: the parent-thread A shows the view, the child-thread B does something like upgrade and so on.

Between two threads, I use the notification center to achieve Inter-Process Communication. When thread B finished doing something, it will sent a notification to thread A, and thread A will do some change on the view, such as change the values of some textfield and so on.

The question is: sometimes the view shows correctly, and other times it fails to show the changed ones. How can I deal with it ?

 

[holmesf]

Hello everyone,
I am a freshman, and I am trying to make a mac application to upgrade some device, and get into trouble now. Here's the question:

The project has a main window, which binds to the AppDelegate Controller; And has two threads: the parent-thread A shows the view, the child-thread B does something like upgrade and so on.

Between two threads, I use the notification center to achieve Inter-Process Communication. When thread B finished doing something, it will sent a notification to thread A, and thread A will do some change on the view, such as change the values of some textfield and so on.

The question is: sometimes the view shows correctly, and other times it fails to show the changed ones. How can I deal with it ?

Don't use NSNotificationCenter for communicating between threads. Notifications are always received on the same thread in which they were sent, in other words, it's probably not doing at all what you want it to. NSNotificationCenter is more geared towards implementing the Observer design pattern, not threading.

from http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSNotificationCenter_Class/Reference/Reference.html

In a multithreaded application, notifications are always delivered in the thread in which the notification was posted, which may not be the same thread in which an observer registered itself.

You could use Grand Central Dispatch to schedule a block for execution on thread A's dispatch queue instead. Grand Central Dispatch will allow you to do this from thread B.

/* In thread B */
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
  /*   ... code you want to execute on thread A ... */
});

Alternatively you can use NSObject's method to perform a selector on the main thread.

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSObject_Class/Reference/Reference.html

- (void)performSelectorOnMainThread:(SEL)aSelector withObject:(id)arg waitUntilDone:(BOOL)wait modes:(NSArray *)array

Both methods are going to ultimately work by queuing some message on the application's run loop on the main thread for execution at a later time.

There might be other methods for accomplishing this as well. Anybody?

 

[MayPeng]

Thanks for your help. I will try according to your suggestion.