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13.21. Waiting for Events to Happen

At certain points in your application, it makes sense to wait until something happens. For instance, if you create a ColorEditor window and want it to assign the color the user selects to a variable, you can use waitVariable to wait until the variable is set. For complete details, see Chapter 15, "Anatomy of the MainLoop".

To have a program wait until a variable's value is changed, call waitVariable: 

$widget->waitVariable(\$var);

Processing will continue as soon as the value contained within $var is changed to something different. To wait until a $widget is visible, use waitVisibility: 

$widget->waitVisibility;

To wait until a widget is destroyed, call waitWindow: 

$widget->waitWindow;

When you call these methods, nothing will happen in your program until the requested event has taken place.

An alternative to waitWindow is OnDestroy, where you specify a callback. The widget methods are still available when you use OnDestroy: 

$widget->OnDestroy(sub { ... });

13.21.1. File Events

There is a special method in Perl/Tk called fileevent, which watches and notifies you when a file is readable or writable. For complete details see Chapter 15, "Anatomy of the MainLoop", Chapter 19, "Interprocess Communicationwith Pipes and Sockets", and Chapter 22, "Perl/Tk and the Web".

Here is an example that shows how fileevent can be used (this code is meant to be executed on a Unix system because we use the Unix tail command):[31]

[31] Thanks to Phivu Nguyen for sharing this code.

use Tk;
open (FH, "tail -f -n 25 text_file|") || die "Could not open file!\n";
my $mw = MainWindow->new;
my $text = $mw->Scrolled("Text", 
                         -width => 80, 
                         -height => 25)->pack(-expand => 1);
$mw->fileevent(FH, 'readable', [\&insert_text]);
MainLoop;

sub insert_text{
  my $curline;
  if ($curline = <FH>)   {
    $text->insert('end', $curline);
    $text->yview('moveto', 100);
  } else {
    $mw->fileevent(FH, 'readable', "");
  }
}

This short program sits around and waits until a file is readable and then inserts the newly read information into a Listbox. You can also use 'writable'. 

$mw->fileevent(FH, 'writable', callback);

If you omit the callback portion, the callback will be returned. Replace the callback with an empty string ("") and the callback is removed.

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