Re: timeout support for methods..

From:

horos11 <horos11@gmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Tue, 1 Sep 2009 20:48:16 -0700 (PDT)

Message-ID:

<36cec136-342f-4a27-8c85-092fcd1820cb@p15g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>

There's no declarative structure for that in Java.

Timeout thread coding is tricky but pretty much necessary here. If you snoop
around the java.util.concurrent package there are some mechanisms that can help.

How about this -

If I make a timer object around the thrid party code that is causing
all the trouble, and set a timeout task to be called on the current
thread, won't an interrupt exception be generated? ie: something like
this:

class TimeoutMe extends TimerTask
{
    Thread thr;

    TimeoutMe(Thread thr)
    {
      this.thr = thr;
    }

    public void run()
    {
      if(thr.isAlive())
      {
        thr.interrupt();
      }
    }
}

class MyClass
{

Timer timer = new Timer();
....

public String method() throws InterruptedException
{
    timer.schedule(new TimeoutMe(Thread.currentThread()), 10000);
    ....
    timer.cancel();
}

Won't this work in the way I'm describing, ie: interrupting the thread
(without killing it) and allowing it to throw an exception gracefully?

As I see it, this is clean in the sense that there are no extra
threads, and hence no need for the handling of data between them, but
I'd be interested to hear any drawbacks in doing this.

Ed