[mrjimmy410]

New to BB dev and have some basics down, but need to solve this and am not looking to re-invent the wheel. Internet searches have not yielded a great answer here...

Use case.
1. User starts timer that updates UI stopwatch
2. User lets app sit idle or leaves app
a. timer keeps running
3. User returns to app and timer updates to correct time span

Ideas.
A. Figure out background thread operations; solve this way.
B. Fake it by persisting state when app closes or goes idle then regenerate state when app comes back(persist the time closed and diff against time re-opened...then continue if timer is still running);solve this way.

Thanks,
Jimmy

Using JDE 4.2.1

[Dan East]

First of all, you need to persist the time the stopwatch was started, instead of worrying about when your app was or wasn't running. Then the UI side of things is simply showing the difference between now and when the stopwatch started. If you're wanting to fire events (alarm clock, etc) then it's a different story, and you'll want to use some formal scheduling API.

One caveat - you should use some sort of standardized time for the timestamp, so timezone changes won't affect your difference calculation. The devices should switch timezones automatically for people that are traveling.

[mrjimmy410]

Thanks.

I seem to not be very efficient in using search because what I am looking for is a simple example that must exist.

1. User starts timer from menu item
2. UI starts counting
3. User lets app be idle (keeps counting in background)
4. User returns to app
5. UI keeps counting...

Basically this demonstrates updating the UI from a separate thread and dealing with idle apps. I am looking for best practices etc. so I do not re-invent the wheel.

Code sample anyone?

[Dan East]

Using a thread for that is overkill (not to mention that worker threads are limited in how they interact with the UI).

Just do something like this:

final Timer t=new Timer();
TimerTask tt=new TimerTask() {
    public void run() {
        //Set value of the field that displays the timer value here
    }
};

t.scheduleAtFixedRate(tt, 1000, 1000);

run will be called every second, so you just set the value you want displayed to whatever UI element you've created for that. Or you can call invalidate() within run, and have a paint routine that simply draws the current timer value (if you want to do the drawing yourself).

[taqi.mir]

Hi,

In my application i want to set the number to generate the call automatically at a later time.
How we have got to do this?