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Why won't my timer work?

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A quick intro

A timer is a good way to create a regular and frequent events.  Or just to let the program sleep for a bit and then come back.  But sometimes the timer doesn't work.   But it's always easy to fix.

You can add a timer to any window.  But it must be a window.  That is a Windows restriction and not a PowerBuilder issue.  For example, I have a window in which I wish to check something every 15 seconds.  In the open even to this window, I have:

timer(15)

Then I put the code for the checking in the timer event of that window.


What didn't work and how I fixed it

A few days ago, I added a timer event to my frame window.  It ran fine under testing in the development environment, but once I created an exe, the timer didn't work.   I couldn't figure it out.  So I went to dejanews and found what I needed.   It turned out that I should have been reading the manual.

I added an extra [optional] parameter to my timer call.  It became:

timer(15, this)

I recompiled, and it worked.  For some reason, under certain circumstances, the timer gets confused and doesn't get triggered properly.  My rule-of-thumb is 'always specify the window for the timer'.


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This page last updated: Wednesday, 23 February 2000
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