Deleting timers from within their StopFcn

Kenneth Eaton — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:55:06 -0500

Looking over the examples The MathWorks gives for using timers, I noticed that they are always deleted after being used (a good practice). However, I was curious if you could just delete a timer from within it's own StopFcn, so that it would delete itself upon completing its task. I tested it a few times and it seems to work just fine.

Since I've never seen an example of this being done, I was just curious if anyone knew of any unforeseen reason why this would be a bad thing to do?

Ken

Re: Deleting timers from within their StopFcn

Kenneth Eaton — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:13:03 -0500

Never mind... I just found a situation where things go wrong. If you are in a situation where a program is waiting for a timer to complete, you get an error. Here is an example:

>> ht=timer('ExecutionMode','fixedRate','Period',1,'TasksToExecute',10,...
'TimerFcn','disp(''tick'');','StopFcn','delete(ht)');
>> start(ht); wait(ht);
tick
tick
tick
tick
tick
tick
tick
tick
tick
tick
??? No appropriate method or public field isRunning for class handle.

Error in ==> timer.wait at 46
end

In this case, I would have to delete the timer after the WAIT command.

Ken

MATLAB Central Newsreader - Deleting timers from within their StopFcn

Deleting timers from within their StopFcn

Re: Deleting timers from within their StopFcn