Correct way to clear a ListView? [Solved]

[Brandan]

What is the correct way to clear a ListView GUI? To clear a List GUI I use

GUICtrlSetData($list, "")

and my list is empty and ready to refill.

I am stumped on how to do a listview. The best I have come up with so far is to delete the control and recreate it.

GUICtrlDelete($listview)
$listview = GUICtrlCreateListView("text",$x,$y)

Having to do that makes me fill like I am missing something.

Edited September 8, 2011 by Brandan

[guinness]

Retrieve the handle of the ListView using GUICtrlGetHandle($iListView) and then use the handle with _GUICtrlListView_DeleteAllItems()

[AdmiralAlkex]

Retrieve the handle of the ListView using GUICtrlGetHandle($iListView) and then use the handle with _GUICtrlListView_DeleteAllItems()

Why is that better than passing the control id to _GUICtrlListView_DeleteAllItems()?

[BrewManNH]

Why is that better than passing the control id to _GUICtrlListView_DeleteAllItems()?

Because deleting the items from the LV with the Control ID takes a lot longer because it deletes the controls 1 at a time in a loop. With the handle it deletes them all at once.

[AdmiralAlkex]

Because deleting the items from the LV with the Control ID takes a lot longer because it deletes the controls 1 at a time in a loop. With the handle it deletes them all at once.

Using the handle also makes AutoIt oblivious to their deletion, so you're leaking the GUICtrlCreateListViewItem() handles. That's not good.

[Zedna]

Using the handle also makes AutoIt oblivious to their deletion, so you're leaking the GUICtrlCreateListViewItem() handles. That's not good.

You are right about leaking, anyway I use it that way too.

If you want fix leaking then use

_GUICtrlListView_AddItem()

instead of

GUICtrlCreateListViewItem()

This way there is no ControlID created but creating listview items by UDF instead of native GUICtrlxxx is slower..

Edited September 6, 2011 by Zedna

[BrewManNH]

I now do it the same way as Zedna when adding to a listview.

As to leaking control ID's, it can be an issue if you have a lot of items that you're creating and deleting a lot, but it would take a long time for it to become an issue because you can have up to 64k control ids. I ran into this before when creating a Listview for a media program I created, and was deleting them and recreating the LV everytime I updated it. I eventually lost all the items in the listview when I ran out of IDs.

It takes longer to create the listview with the UDF, but I've never run out of control IDs that way. For around 4500 items it takes about 3-5 seconds to create a listview with subitems.

[Brandan]

Thanks to everyone who replied. I had not found the UDF part of the help files before. Looking at those, a person could just do it all as if coding in C or C++. I am surprised that the UDF way is slower than the native way at entering items into the list(extra time checking the var type?). Thanks for the comments about the leaks. I will keep it in mind and make sure I do it right as I could see my prg hitting the 60k limit once in a while.

[Zedna]

Here is my topic about speed optimizing of ListView UDF

"_GUICtrlListView_AddItem() MUCH slower than GUICtrlCreateListViewItem()"