How to make the cleanest code when reporting progress to a user?

Question

I\'ve struggled for the last couple of months to come up with some clean code to report progress to a user. Everything always seems to boil down to:

ReportProgr         


        

Answer 1

You could call ReportProgress from inside the doTask methods, that might make it look a little cleaner, instead you would just have:

doTask1();
doTask2();

The reporting would be handled inside those methods.

You could use AOP, but my brain screams KISS!!(Keep It Simple Stupid) in this case. If this is just a simple representation of something more complicated that you are dealing with, AOP could be an option.

Answer 2

Unfortunately I think the best way to do this does depend on the details -- at the very least what language you are using. For example in python you could use a context manager to allow for writing code like this:

with progress_report("Task 1"):
    do_task_1()

This could, e.g., ensure that the "Task 1 is done" is reported even if do_task_1() raises an exception. If you wanted to, you could handle exceptions separately and print something different like "Task 1 failed" or "Task 1 aborted."

Answer 3

+1 on the AOP suggestion. This is a classic crosscutting concern that AOP would solve elegantly.

Answer 4

In our tool kit, we have a task controller that manages tasks. A task is run as a thread. In addition to typical thread support, a task supports progress methods. One possible view onto the progress is a visual progress bar with a title that refers to task name and step within task. To support visible statistics and status, the code must make occasional calls to the task's progress method. Typically, this is done within for loops since the percentage progress can be estimated by the current index divided by the limit.

The task controller is a useful place to add global thread control, status probes, other statistics and performance measurement hooks. Some multithreaded bugs and timing issues can be analyzed by examining the controller's state, and the state of all the tasks.

Answer 5

Could you perhaps use Aspect Oriented Programming, and devise a Progress Aspect?

There are a number of AOP implementations. In the Java world, the 2 most common are AspectJ and Spring (which uses either AspectJ, or Proxy based aspects).

Answer 6

I wouldn't hand-code the numeric parts of the displayed messages like that (any time you need to add or remove actions or change the sequence you've got a mess of cut-and-paste to do). You'd want whatever object is handling the ReportProgress method to auto-increment itself as it goes along.