Hi there,
I am using mess() to let the user track what the program does.
It works fine but within an selectdo it does not show!
If I run it in debug, it shows !
example

mess("tdebns0020", 0, "start ...")

select bla bla bla
endselect

clean.mess()
mess("tdebns0020", 0, "start second step")

select bla bla
selectdo
clean.mess()
counter = counter + 1
mess("tdebns0020", 0, "busy with record " & str$(counter) )
endselect
As I said, in the debugger it works fine, but when i run the program normally it does not show the message with the counter, just blank :confused:

Yep - I tried that in 4c3 years ago and I can't remember what convinced me that it would not work. So now I just add a status line on the bottom of the screen. I just put something in the status and do a display. It was easier to control to me. I think I also once did a progress bar, but can't remember which program that was in.

Try removing the clean.mess

SELECTDO processing is quite fast, so the clean.mess 'hides' the next mess().

Alternatively, you can 'slow' things down by a suspend(333) for example, after the mess(), and display the mess() every 1000 counts. Not sure if the users will like that.

This is natural as the program runs on server and screen refresh is done client using client resources which is bit of a slow activity compared to server CPU processes .

I had similar thing for tracking the % of work done on a screen and it use to jump randomly to 100% depending on actual gaps between each screen refresh .

U can try suspend as recommended or use display or display.fld function to display messages on screen . But both these option will slow down the program . So as an alternate u may accept the current situation if not making great difference.

thanks for the info guys.

Remove the clean.mess() function call in your select loop. With this statement you will remove the message which was set after processing/counting the previous record.