Yield and SleepMs in PowerBuilder

This is a note for PowerBuilder programmers: Some Chilkat classes provide a SleepMs method, which is provided as a convenience. The SleepMs method puts the thread to sleep for a number of milliseconds. However, this is not the same as a PowerBuilder Yield, which “Yields control to other graphic objects, including objects that are not PowerBuilder objects. Yield checks the message queue and if there are messages in the queue, it pulls them from the queue.”

The above was found by a Chilkat customer w/ regard to the Task.SleepMs method:

The problem was the when we were calling awParent.Dynamic wf_download_percent(percent) to display the download percentage on a progress window of ours, the window wasn’t always getting control to show that! I needed to add a Yield() right after that and then it was perfect. That’s a fairly common problem in PowerBuilder. I have to admit I would have thought that your SleepMs method would be tantamount to a Yield(), but obviously it’s not.

Perhaps you might consider adding something to your PowerBuilder samples that show progress of Async actions, where instead of just logging progress it was calling a made-up function to display progress, and then add a Yield() after that to make it clear that is needed.