>>I know there are other solutions to this problem, but there have been so many times when I want to have better control over event processing, so my question is how can I programmatically trigger an event to be processed in the event loop instead of immediately?
>
>Among simple tricks is to have an inactive timer which you will activate, have it do what you want after some milliseconds and deactivate again.

Drew Speedie described something he called a "hand_grendade" which did just that.

Here's our code (sorry about the dependencies, but they're easy enough to figure out):

LPARAMETERS tcCommand, tnDelay, toThis, toThisform
LOCAL lcThisVarname, lcThisFormVarname, loTimer

tnDelay = Param_Val(tnDelay,200)
lcScript = tcCommand
lcCRLF = CHR(13)+CHR(10)

IF VARTYPE(toThis) = "O"
	lcThisVarname = "hg_" + SYS(2015)
	RELEASE &lcThisVarname
	PUBLIC &lcThisVarname
	STORE toThis TO (lcThisVarname)
	lcScript = STRTRAN(lcScript,"this.",lcThisVarname + ".",1,-1,1)
	lcScript = lcScript + lcCRLF + "RELEASE " + lcThisVarname
ENDIF

IF VARTYPE(toThisform) = "O"
	lcThisFormVarname = "hg_" + SYS(2015)
	RELEASE &lcThisFormVarname
	PUBLIC &lcThisFormVarname
	STORE toThisform TO (lcThisFormVarname)
	lcScript = STRTRAN(lcScript,"thisform.",lcThisFormVarname + ".",1,-1,1)
	lcScript = lcScript + lcCRLF + "RELEASE " + lcThisFormVarname
ENDIF

lcScript = "lparameters toTimer" + lcCRLF + lcScript

_SCREEN.oapp.addproperty("oHGTimer",NEWOBJECT("timer_adhoc","proctrls.vcx","",lcScript,tnDelay,.T.,.T.,.T.))