Best practices for progress counting

The ResInsight progress update system is available in cafUserInterface as caf::ProgressInfo. Each method that needs to track progress needs to speficy a maximum number of steps in the constructor of caf::ProgressInfo. You typically then have a number of sub-task with different progress messages, taking different amounts of time. You can specify the progress description and the next progress increment with nextProgressIncrement and then calling incrementProgress once the sub-task is complete.

However, this leads to a lot of noise in the code, with lots of code lines dealing with progress updates and not actual algorithm logic. A more consise way is to use the ProgressTask system through the ProgressInfo::task() method. This returns a RAII (Resource Aquisition Is Initialization) type object that causes the progress update to occur when the object is deleted by going out of scope. Example:

caf::ProgressInfo progInfo( 100, "Creating Fracture Model Plot" );
{
    auto task = progInfo.task( "Creating formation track", 2 );
    createFormationTrack( plot, fractureModel, eclipseCase );
}

{
    auto task = progInfo.task( "Creating facies track", 2 );
    createFaciesTrack( plot, fractureModel, eclipseCase );
}

{
    auto task = progInfo.task( "Creating layers track", 2 );
    createLayersTrack( plot, fractureModel, eclipseCase );
}
{
    auto task = progInfo.task( "Creating parameters track", 15 );
...
}

This technique creates code that more clearly shows different sub-tasks and uses just one line for each sub-task to deal with progress updates.