TThreadedTimer

[aehimself 396]

In some occasions the inaccuracy of Delphi's TTimer cased serious headaches so I did some digging and found an old post on how to turn a thread into a much more accurate timer. While I analyzed the code to find out how it works I made some comments and also took the liberty to change it here and there... and wrapped the whole thing in a TComponent which easily can be installed in the IDE and dropped on almost anything.

The TThreadedTimer's OnTimer event runs in the VCL thread so any UI element can be manipulated from there. It is also a drop-in replacement for TTimer, meaning you change your DFM and PAS and it should work exactly the same way.

 

My version delays enabling the thread so it won't spin freely until it has an event handler, properly resets the timing sequence if the Timer is set to Disabled and then Enabled again and also - in theory - the OnTimer event will no longer fire during destruction. Being a Windows-only guy it relies on WinApi, but I guess it can be made cross-platform by using Delphi's own TEvent class... as it yields zero benefits I didn't care to look into it.

 

As the original idea wasn't mine the right thing to do is to release this version under the do-whatever-you-want license. Feel free to use, point out possible issues or modify it to fit your needs.

 

God bless open source 🙂

uThreadedTimer.7z