Connect Action QT window

[Philip]

Hi

I have an action, that creates folders and opens them as an explorer window. This action may not always complete successfully if certain things are not set up correctly.

So I want to be able to notify the user that the action has failed.  There is a 5 sec time out on actions that presents them as failed if there isn't a reply. Unfortunately as the action can at times take longer than 5secs before it can be determined if it ran OK or not, so I had to reply before doing my stuff. `self.session.event_hub.publish_reply(event,data)`

That's all fine, but now I need to provide a further message back to the user to say "actually its not worked and here's why". I thought seeing as it doesn't seem possible to send further replies, (presumably because the webpage stops looking after its received one), I could just show a `PySide.QtGui.QMessageBox` with my message. However it seems I can't as the environment my action is running in, already has a QApplication started, and my action is running in a thread that is not the Main GUi Thread.

Are there any suggestions on how I could either use QT or in some way provide visual feedback to the user about what has happened?

One thought I had which is not Ideal, but could be work able is to Popen a separate Python thread which can launch my window and receive cmd args about msg, but the msg might cover multiple lines making that not so practical.

I did consider using a job but It just didn't feel quite right the action normally takes less than 5 secs.

Thanks

Phil

 

[Philip]

Realise this would have been better posted under Actions rather than api. I don't mind reposting, but I'm not sure how to delete this one.

[Mattias Lagergren]

I've moved this to the Actions section.

Interesting question and that you found that you could reply manually. Another common way is to offload heavy things to a separate async thread - but that only solves a part of your issue.

Perhaps running it as with pOpen is the easiest. As for long strings you could possibly base64 encode/decode it:

import base64
command_argument = base64.b64encode('this is a long string \n with new lines.')

 

[Mattias Lagergren]

We do not have any convenience functions for doing it but you can invoke a function in the main GUI thread. See this implementation for reference: http://stackoverflow.com/a/12127115

[Philip]

Fantastic, that's a great solution. Works well.

I didn't know you could do that in QT.

Also I'd love to say I found how to reply myself,  but I didn't, that was thanks to Björn suggesting it in a support ticket. :-)

Thanks

 

[Mattias Lagergren]

Cool, I'm glad to hear that it worked out! :-)

[FranZ]

I'd like to put in a vote for support for 2 things:
 

1) Extend the time out for the action messages to longer than 5 seconds.

Sub-processing is not good enough as it gives a false impression that something worked.  In fact, all we know is that the "launch" worked (not too informative).

A configurable time-out would be nice.

2) Expose a nice mechnism for providing feedback to the user when processes take a long time.

Example:  My action kicks off a long process (e.g., creating a lot of directories), and later after directory creation, I give my artists a custom message saying "Your directories are created!"
Yes, I know I can do this via the jobs queue (but who is going to look there?).  I want something "in your face", but not where the user has to click "OK"
I'll check out the Qt solution, but really this should be supported easily in the actions.