Speed III

Carrying on from yesterday: I converted the specific module to emit HTML stored in a file. After the report is finished, Word opens the HTML file. The conversion was surprisingly easy; the main thing which I was worried about was creating the main table in the report which has a slightly irregular structure. The 'colspan' command helped here, and in fact, it turned out to be much easier to create a table in HTML than it is in Word!

After completing everything and debugging so that the program worked, I checked its performance; it's maybe only 10% faster than Word and definitely not a huge improvement. So the plan is as follows:

1. Turn the new code into a thread
2. In the main program, when the user presses on the button which executes this report, the button is deactivated.
3. When the thread finishes, it has to notify the main program, and will set a flag saying that there is an HTML file waiting to be displayed.
4. Check whether it is safe to run Word, and if so, do so and read the file. At the same time, clear the 'pending' flag and enable the button.

This reminds me of programming TSRs in assembly language 20 years ago: is it safe to pop-up? Set flags to show that the pop-up is waiting.

When is it safe to run Word? I am going to take a very conservative view, and say that it is unsafe any time a module in the program is run. This will be very easy to implement, as every module is activated by pressing a button on the main screen; I simply add 'wordsafe:= false' in the button's handler before the module is displayed, and 'wordsafe:= true' after the module closes. At the same time, a check should be made to see whether there is a file pending, and if so, display it.