[R] gWidgets process management

[Peter McMahan]

Thanks for that link to the mac Gtk2, it's been very helpful.

To work around my original problem I've decided to just have the gui  
be a seperate function that returns the parameter values entered. Then  
I'll call that function from within a non-gui function -- so have the  
window close and then the process start, all in a while loop.
This won't allow for a button to stop the simulation, but it will do.
Thanks for all your help everybody.

Peter

On Feb 12, 2008, at 1:56 PM, Michael Lawrence wrote:

> On Feb 12, 2008 1:51 PM, Peter McMahan <mcmahan at uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
>> Thanks, that's very helpful. Unfortunately Gtk2 is difficult to get
>> running on a Mac, so I've been trying the gWidgetstcktk interface.
>> It sounds like the behavior you're describing is exactly what I want,
>> so it may just be a difference in the TGtk2 and tcltk event loops?
>> In your example, can you think of a way to have a "cancel" button  
>> that
>> would be able to kill reallySlowFunction() early?
>> for the time being, I guess I'll just work on getting the gtk28
>> package from macports working...
>
>
> There are GTK+ binaries available that should work with the RGtk2 CRAN
> binary for the Mac.
>
> http://r.research.att.com/gtk2-runtime.dmg
>
>
>> Thanks,
>> Peter
>>
>> On Feb 12, 2008, at 1:31 PM, John Verzani wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Peter,
>>>
>>> I think this issue has more to do with the event loop than gWidgets.
>>> I've cc'ed Michael Lawrence, who may be able to shed more light on
>>> this. Perhaps gIdleAdd from RGtk2 can work around this, but I didn't
>>> get anywhere. My understanding is that the event loop is preventing
>>> the console from being interactive, but not GTK events. So for
>>> instance, the GUI in the following example is responsive, during the
>>> execution, but the command line is not.
>>>
>>> library(gWidgets)
>>> options("guiToolkit"="RGtk2")
>>>
>>> reallySlowFunction = function(n=20) {
>>> for(i in 1:n) {
>>>   cat("z")
>>>   Sys.sleep(1)
>>> }
>>> cat("\n")
>>> }
>>>
>>>
>>> w <- gwindow("test")
>>> g <- ggroup(cont=w, horizontal=FALSE)
>>> b <- gbutton("click me", cont=g,handler = function(h,...)
>>> reallySlowFunction())
>>> r <- gradio(1:3, cont=g, handler = function(h,...) print(svalue(h
>>> $obj)))
>>>
>>> ## you can click the radio button and get a response, but not the
>>> console
>>>
>>>
>>> --John
>>>
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>> I'm trying to make a graphical interface for an R function
>>> I've written. A common use for the function is to call it with
>>> specific parameters, and then watch the output as it evolves.
>>> There's not necessarily a logical stopping point, so I usually
>>> use ctrl-C when I'm done to stop it.
>>> I've made a gWidgets interface to the function that gets some
>>> user info and then on a button click calls the function. The
>>> gWidgets window, however, seems to be frozen as long as the
>>> function is running, and the function output seems to be
>>> happening in the "background" in my R session, so ctrl-C (esc
>>> on the Mac GUI) does not work to stop it. I have to kill R
>>> entirely to stop the process.
>>> So after all that setup here is my question:
>>> Is there some way to have a gWidgets window interrupt a
>>> function that it has called via a widget handler?
>>> Thanks,
>>> Peter
>>>
>>> --
>>> John Verzani
>>> CUNY/CSI Department of Mathematics
>>> verzani at math.csi.cuny.edu
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>