Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu!dudek
From: dudek@ai.toronto.edu (Gregory Dudek)
Subject: Append menu is slow.
Message-ID: <89May9.171757edt.11077@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>
Summary: AppendMenu must do serial searches, is there a faster way?
Keywords: AppendMenu menu slow efficiency
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Date: Tue, 9 May 89 17:17:45 EDT

The application I am writing needs to create some large menus; up to
128 items (sometimes more).  I know, that's uuuugly but I want to
allow selection from a long list of undifferentiated items.  

  I am using AppendMenu to make some big menus and it is slowwwwww (i.e. on
the order of 5 seconds on a Mac Plus).  Worse yet, I have to create 
new menus like this dynamically & the delays are unbearable.  If 
anybody has any suggestions on how to speed things up, they'd be 
most welcome.
  I am pretty sure AppendMenu must re-scan the menu serially each time
a new item is inserted.  With this in mind, I tried using InsertItem
but it's just as slow.  While we're at it, inserting several items at a
time using the semicolon as a separator doesn't help either.

  (Yes, I can use a scrolling list instead of a huge menu, but I am
  not at all sure that's any more convenient.  Such a list is essentially
  the same as a menu & have a lot of them floating around the screen could
  be a real pain.)

  Gregory Dudek
-- 
Dept. of Computer Science (vision group)    University of Toronto
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