View source for FAQ How do I run a lengthy process in a wizard?

The <tt>IWizardContainer</tt> passed to your wizard extends the interface called <tt>IRunnableContext</tt>.  This means that you can pass it an <tt>IRunnableWithProgress</tt> and that it will give progress feedback to the user while it runs.  Keep in mind that as with all long-running operations, the container will generally fork a different thread to run your operation. If you want to manipulate any widgets from the operation, you&#146;ll have to use <tt>Display.asyncExec</tt>.  The FAQ Examples plug-in includes a sample wizard, called <tt>AddingWizard</tt>, that computes the sum of two integers, using the wizard container&#146;s progress monitor:
<pre>
   getContainer().run(true, true, new IRunnableWithProgress() {
      public void run(IProgressMonitor monitor) {
         int sum = n1 + n2;
         monitor.beginTask("Computing sum: ", sum);
         for (int i = 0; i &lt; sum; i++) {
            monitor.subTask(Integer.toString(i));
            //sleep to simulate long running operation
            Thread.sleep(100);
            monitor.worked(1);
         }
         monitor.done();
      }
   });
</pre>

Your wizard can specify whether it needs a progress bar or a simple busy cursor.  For operations that may take more than a second, you should use a progress bar.  This is done by implementing <tt>needsProgressMonitor</tt> method on <tt>IWizard</tt> to return <tt>true</tt>.

== See Also: ==
*[[FAQ How do I use progress monitors?]]
*[[FAQ Why do I get an invalid thread access exception?]]

<hr><font size=-2>This FAQ was originally published in [http://www.eclipsefaq.org Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs]. Copyright 2004, Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. This text is made available here under the terms of the [http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html Eclipse Public License v1.0].</font>