BeginThreadEx Function

Important: as a general rule, you should write your application in a such way that it will behave correctly without EurekaLog on board. This means that if your or 3rd party code throws an exception in a thread - it must be handled in a way that you expect. For example, by showing an error message, canceling action, retrying, etc. Once your application behaves like it is supposed to do - then you add EurekaLog for it. EurekaLog will auto-handle all unhandled exceptions automatically (by hooking few well-known places), and for everything else - you can call EurekaLog from your own handlers when needed. In other words:

EurekaLog provides two helper routines to simplify thread management: BeginThreadEx function and TThreadEx class - which should be used instead of BeginThread function and TThread class respectively. Both routines are from EBase unit. EBase unit is a special unit that can be included in any application without including full EurekaLog code. Therefore you can safely use EBase unit in your applications even without EurekaLog enabled.

Note: when your thread is processing exception, the processing will be performed in a background thread. EurekaLog's event handlers will be called from a background thread. You need to use some sort of synchronization if you are accessing global data in your EurekaLog's event handlers. This also means that several threads can process multiple exceptions simultaneously at the same time. You can avoid this by marshaling processing to main thread. For example, you can use TThread(Ex) and analyze .FatalException property in your main thread. See description of TThreadEx class for examples. Alternatively, you may use "Consecutive processing" option.

Both BeginThreadEx function and TThreadEx class offers two additional arguments:

Note: the EurekaLog's state will be ignored if you compile your application without EurekaLog (or with disabled EurekaLog). On the other hand, the thread name is never ignored. Thread name is used by debugger to show thread's name in Threads window.

Thread name is arbitrary text string which can contain any combination of characters. Thread name will be shown in debugger (Threads window) and it will be used as thread caption in bug reports. You can use thread name to identificate threads.

Example of using BeginThreadEx function for this sample code:

function ThreadFunc(Parameter: Pointer): Integer;
begin
  // No additional code needed inside thread func

 
  // <- ... your code for the thread ...

 
  Result := 0; // to indicate "success"
end;
 
procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
var
  TID: Cardinal;
begin
  // This code ignores any failures in thread, but
  // you may want to use GetExitCodeThread function.
  CloseHandle(BeginThreadEx(nil, 0, ThreadFunc, nil, 0, TID,

    // New argument: thread name
    'This is my thread with Parameter = ' + 
      IntToHex(NativeUInt(nil), SizeOf(Pointer) * 2)));
end;

This code sample works exactly as the previous code sample. You can pass thread name right into BeginThreadEx function. Thread will be automatically named - regardless of EurekaLog's state.

Threads launched with BeginThreadEx will be EurekaLog-enabled by default. You can supply optional Boolean argument for BeginThreadEx function to disable EurekaLog in thread, for example:

BeginThreadEx(nil, 0, ThreadFunc, nil, 0, TID, 'Thread Name', False { disable EurekaLog in thread } );

Notes:

See also: