Bug 952 – Return value of IJ.showMessageWithCancel() is ignored in macros

Bug 952 - Return value of IJ.showMessageWithCancel() is ignored in macros


Summary:	Return value of IJ.showMessageWithCancel() is ignored in macros

Status:	RESOLVED FIXED

Product:	Fiji
Classification:	Unclassified
Component:	ImageJ1
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Macintosh Mac OS

Importance:	P5 enhancement
Assigned To:	ImageJ Bugs Mailing List

URL:

Depends on:
Blocks:

Reported:	2014-11-04 09:51 CST by Tiago Ferreira
Modified:	2015-04-21 11:41 CDT
CC List:	3 users (show)

See Also:

Description Tiago Ferreira 2014-11-04 09:51:21 CST

A (IJ1) macro calling showMessageWithCancel() is expected to terminate if the user chooses "Cancel"
(http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/developer/macro/functions.html#showMessageWithCancel).

In Fiji, however, macros continue to run after pressing "Cancel". Example:

showMessageWithCancel("In IJ1 a macro exits when the user clicks 'Cancel'");
showMessage("But not in Fiji (unless it runs from the IJ1 editor)");

Running the above in the buil-in editor (e.g., Plugins>New>Text Window) works as expected.

Probably not a major issue, but it will likely break some macros down the road.

Comment 1 Curtis Rueden 2014-11-17 16:02:13 CST

I debugged into it, but I have to admit I have no idea how this works.

Eventually, the ImageJ 1.x code resolves down to:

https://github.com/imagej/ImageJA/blob/v1.49k/src/main/java/ij/macro/Functions.java#L120
Which does:
https://github.com/imagej/ImageJA/blob/v1.49k/src/main/java/ij/macro/Functions.java#L1636
Which is this:
https://github.com/imagej/ImageJA/blob/v1.49k/src/main/java/ij/IJ.java#L639-L644

Maybe there is something clever in GenericDialog that cancels macros, but doesn't work with the ImageJ2-script-language version of the macro support...

Comment 2 Wayne Rasband 2014-11-17 20:34:08 CST

The showMessageWithCancel() macro function calls IJ.showMessageWithCancel(), which calls GenericDialog.wasCanceled(), which aborts the macro if the dialog was canceled. I do not know why this is not working in the Fiji Script Editor.

Comment 3 Curtis Rueden 2014-11-21 15:14:23 CST

Thank you for the information, Wayne!

The issue was that when a macro runs from the ImageJ2 Script Editor, the thread name does not end with "Macro$".

I committed a fix:
https://github.com/imagej/imagej-legacy/commit/b79d3010297e4185ad7510df2c0fc09dcc5ce85b

And also another related workaround:
https://github.com/imagej/imagej-legacy/commit/883e01c456fc6d7c1ca03557972e27f72ca77182

So this issue will be resolved once a new imagej-legacy JAR is released and uploaded to the ImageJ update site.