how to manage popup windows?

[billconan]

Hello,

I’m working on a project that has many pop up windows. They are not organized properly and things are getting messy. I’m wondering if there are any common practice or design patterns for solving this problem.

I’d like to give you some concrete examples:

1. my program connects to two different tcp ports on the same ip. cutting off any of them, the user will be notified with a MessageBox. But in case of unplugging network cable, both message box will show, which is unnecessary.

2. we provide a shortcut key to display a setting dialog. However the program can also show the same dialog when certain event happens. If the user opens the setting dialog already, those event will still trigger a second setting dialog.

3. when application settings are not correct, user will disconnect from the server and an error dialog will show up and terminate the program. But if the user knows about the situation and has opened the setting dialog to fix the issue, the error dialog will terminate his work. which is bad.

I don’t know how to deal with this window management problem in a complex software project. Of course, I can solve the issue case by case by checking if certain dialog is shown before displaying another dialog. But there are too many cases, when the code base gets big, this is not practical.

there must be some generic solution I think.