Way around DoEvents taking forever

[BrendanDavis]

Everyone knows DoEvents takes forever if you're doing anything lengthly with it(adding a large amount of items to a listbox, for example). But it lets you do other tasks, so it's great in that respect.

But let's say you want a label to be a real-time display of items being added to the listbox(like a counter), but you're adding a large number of items to the listbox and you don't want it to take FOREVER. There's a way around it, and it's very simple. I'm sure a lot of people already know about this, but for the folks who don't(possibly new to VB), this will let you have the best of both worlds with DoEvents:

Public Function sysDoEventsIf(doIf As Integer, isDivisibleBy As Integer) As Boolean
 
    On Error GoTo endWithoutEvents
    
    If doIf = 0 Then GoTo endWithoutEvents
    If doIf < isDivisibleBy Then GoTo endWithoutEvents
        
        Dim divisResult As Integer
        divisResult = (doIf / isDivisibleBy)
            
            If divisResult < 1 Then GoTo endWithoutEvents
                If InStrB((doIf / isDivisibleBy), ".") > 0 Then GoTo endWithoutEvents
                    
                    sysDoEventsIf = True
                    DoEvents
                
endWithoutEvents:
 
End Function

What does that do? It checks if the variable you specify is equally divisible by anothe specified number, and then ONLY does "DoEvents" if it is. How is that useful? Here's an example:

Private Sub Command1_Click()
    
    Dim d As Boolean
    Dim i As Integer
    
    For i = 0 To 24999
        d = sysDoEventsIf(i, 100)
        List1.AddItem "Item " & i, i
            If d = True Then Label1.Caption = "Items: " & List1.ListCount
    Next i
    
    Label1.Caption = "Items: " & List1.ListCount
 
End Sub

This button(Command1) adds 25,000 items to a listbox. The kicker is it will only call DoEvents to free up the process if the current step(defined as "i") is divisible by 100. So rather than calling DoEvents on EVERY step(making the process take a lot longer), it will only call it every 10 steps!

You can make it call DoEvents as often as you want. Change the function call to "d = sysDoEventsIf(i, 1000)" and it will only call DoEvents if the current step integer is divisible by 1000 evenly.



NOTE: The larger the number you're trying to divide it by, the quicker it goes. The smaller the number you're trying to divide it by, the slower it will go.



Hope this helps some folks with... whatever.



-Brendan