The standard solution to the problem is to run the workload, whatever it is, on another thread.

However, even if you do limit the total amount of work to be performed there is still the problem that the search is being performed on the UI thread and while it is going on nothing else can happen. You can also limit the number of files returned using the MaxFilesToRetrieve property. You can limit the search by setting the TimeoutSeconds property which simply halts the search after the specified number of seconds. The only problem with this approach is that it blocks your program from doing any thing else until the search is complete - which is fine as long as this isn't a long time.

We explored the simplest way to implement a search in the previous article (if this doesn't make sense then make sure to read it first): SearchJob SJob1 = new SearchJob() If you don't know how to do these things then check out Getting started with dtSearch. It is assumed that you already have dtSearch setup and an index ready to search. In this article we take a look at how to deal with big searches and the sorts of things you can do with what you find. Although the main conclusion has to be that this is a really easy to use system, there are always considerations about how to do things in a slightly more sophisticated way. In the first part of my close look at the search and indexing system dtSearch, I covered getting started and the basic principles of operation. DtSearch is very easy to use but what do you do when a search is taking so long that it blocks the UI thread? Easy, just run the search on another thread! We take a look at how this works and how it interacts with the UI.

Dtsearch searchresultsitem