Re: Run menu action in background

["Philipp E. Letschert" <phil uni-koblenz de>]

On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 10:51:26PM -0500, muppet wrote:
> On Jan 10, 2007, at 8:36 PM, Philipp E. Letschert wrote:
>
> > I have a subroutine connected to a popup menu item. When that  
> > routine is
> > finished a new popup window displays the result. Sometimes the  
> > routine takes
> > longer to finish and during that time the popup menu stays visible.
> >
> > How can I run the subroutine in background and have the popup menu  
> > disappear
> > right after activating the menu item?
>
> Have your menu item handler install an idle action that starts the  
> dialog box.  That is:
>
> 1  user activates menu item
> 2  menu handler is called
> 3  menu handler does Glib::Idle->add (\&do_the_thing);
> 4  menu handler finishes, menu disappears
> 5  control returns to main loop
> 6  main loop sees that there is a pending idle action
> 7  do_the_thing() fires
> 8  do_the_thing() launches your dialog box
>
> In essence, it's just a layer of indirection to defer running the  
> dialog box until "sometime later".

Thanks, partial success. The menu disappears as requested, but when step 7 is
reached, the main window freezes until do_the_thing() finishes. It would be
great if the user could continue using the application normally during the
subroutine runs (and queue additional calls to that subroutine...).
Setting a lower priority with

Glib::Idle->add(\&do_the_thing, $data, 300);

did not work as desired, I've looked up the API, the tutorial and other sources,
but haven't found the right answer (or overlooked it?).
Currently I'm also a bit confused if this is a Glib/Gtk issue or perl-specific
(fork, threads?).

Additional hints, or a pointer to a working solution would be very nice.

TIA, Phil