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How to make the cleanest code when reporting progress to a user?

Asked 2008-11-17T22:05:31.847
12

I've struggled for the last couple of months to come up with some clean code to report progress to a user. Everything always seems to boil down to:

ReportProgress("Starting Task 1");
doTask1();
ReportProgress("Task 1 is done");

ReportProgress("Starting Task 2");
doTask2();
ReportProgress("Task 2 is done");

//etc... where report progress does some form of output to the user.

The good coder in me screams "There's got to be a cleaner way!" But I'm stumped. Any thoughts?

EDIT :: I'm looking more for information on architectural information as opposed to implementation specific. The code given is very oversimplified.

coding-style progress-bar
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Unfortunately I think the best way to do this does depend on the details -- at the very least what language you are using. For example in python you could use a context manager to allow for writing code like this:

with progress_report("Task 1"):
    do_task_1()

This could, e.g., ensure that the "Task 1 is done" is reported even if do_task_1() raises an exception. If you wanted to, you could handle exceptions separately and print something different like "Task 1 failed" or "Task 1 aborted."

answered 2008-11-17T23:02:25.290

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