Can EW init be broken up for single thread applications?

Question

Hi There,

We are using a single threaded system. When we initialise EW, we naturally load some images. On startup, we find that EwProcessSignals() on it's second or third call will hold the processor program counter for about 5 seconds. This I understand- it takes time to load graphics. But is it possible to EW to initialise in a more broken down way so that the time EW holds the program counter is less?

(We are using EW 8.30)

Kind Regards,

Rob

Answer 1

Hello Rob,

Within Embedded Wizard the bitmap resources are loaded as soon as they are needed. I assume that you might have put all your GUI elements into the root, so that all resources get loaded within the init. Is this correct?
Alternatively, when you dynamically instantiate your screens as soon as they are needed, you load the screen related bitmaps only when the new screen comes up. This allows you to shift the loading time of most resources from the startup phase to the navigation phase during runtime.

Also it would be interesting how many bitmap you are loading? What's the size of the bitmaps?
I guess changing the application structure might already solve your issue.

Generally the loading of a bitmap resources within Embedded Wizard is always a non interrupt-able action. This can take some time, especially if you are loading very large bitmaps. Typically this happens if a lot of frames are put into one bitmap. Within Embedded Wizard 9.30 we added the lazy loading of bitmap frames. So here only the used frames are loaded.

Besides of this our GUI Services team also can offer an own PngDecoder as an add on package. This PngDecoder supports dynamic loading of PNG resources also asynchronously. Here 'asynchronously' means that only chunks of the PNGs are loaded and decoded on each Embedded Wizard loop cycle. With this you also can manage loading of huge images without blocking your application.

With kind regards,
Rudolf