Stop drawing

[Anonymous User]

Not sure if this is in 10 or not, I'm using 9.3.1. I would love to see a button to stop drawing. I know people used to click the world, or double click in the gray areas etc to try and stop the labeling and redrawing. For example, I have a large drawing with contours, contour labels, aerial photos, line work etc. If I turn off one set of contours I actually want to turn off both sets of contour feature classes, the aerials and some line work, for example. I can't do that because when I uncheck one of the contours it starts redrawing immediately.

I want a button to say "no, stop drawing. I wasn't done yet". I would love for the button to work immediately. I know there's a "pause" button. The problem with the "pause" button is it doesn't work immediately so usually you still have to wait for it to redraw. Also, it turns the whole map area grey. I need to stop drawing but still see my drawing.

What do you think?

[DavidKnudsen]

I absolutely agree that the pause button should not wipe away whatever content is already on the screen. It should simply stop any refreshes of the screen except those that are manually requested. (The redraw screen button down next to the pause button should still be honored.) Some other visual indicator (a giant, faded pause symbol watermark over the screen content?) could be used to indicate that no automatic updates are being made to the screen in paused mode.  This seems eminently doable to me.

While I would also like to be able to immediately and reliably interrupt drawing in progress, this could be more of a chore to implement. The reasons that layers may be slow to draw can vary. The local loop responsible for drawing each feature to the screen ought to be easy to make responsive to interruption, but layer drawing can also involve data fetching from remote sources. Maybe it's a hassle to make sure this happens asynchronously so that the program is not hung up waiting for a response before it can honor an interrupt request?

[BradS]

I am not familiar with the behind the scenes programming of the ArcGIS Desktop application, but it seems to me that the "Pause Drawing" button should work immediately. Can't there be a process that always checking to see if the Pause button has been pressed, and when it is, it cancels all processes that are running?? If this is not currently possible because of the way the application/operating-system/etc is set up, then this should be something that needs to be worked towards in the future.

Having the pause button is more useful than not having it, but unfortunately, the current functionality of the Pause button is still not enough to prevent immense frustration. Example:
Oops I clicked the wrong layer on - now it's going to load all 200,000 polygons! Stop!!!!! Nope, gonna have to wait for it to draw anyways. Pressing the pause button does not really pause the process so I can then uncheck the wrongly clicked layer, and then unpause the drawing.