I have a thread, A
which has a list. List holds some objects. Now I want to design a mechanisim by which I can send some message to thread A
.
Thread A
runs in a loop (it does not wait or sleep).
Some other thread, B
, sends some message to thread A
and thread A
empties all its queues.
How can I send messages between threads?
class A extends Thread {
List<Object> objs = something; //Init it
void run() {
while(true) {
//Body which works on objects.
//After receiving an external message, "A" should perform some action, for example, empty objects.
}
}
}
EDIT: Can I do it like this?
class A extends Thread {
List<Object> objs = something; //Init it
Boolean flag = false;
public void setFlag(boolean value) {
synchronized(flag) {
this.flag = value;
}
}
public void getFlag() {
synchronized(flag) {
return this.flag;
}
}
void run() {
while(true) {
//Body which works on objects.
//After receiving an external message, A should perform some action, for example, empty objects.
if (getFlag == true)
//Empty list
}
}
}
You could have a BlockingQueue
of message objects. Other threads would place messages onto the queue. As part of the while(true)
loop, thread A
would poll
the queue and process any messages that have arrived.
In code:
class A extends Thread{
List<Object> objs = something ;//init it
BlockingQueue<Message> queue = new LinkedBlockingQueue<Message>();
void run(){
while(true){
Message msg;
while ((msg = queue.poll()) != null) {
// process msg
}
// do other stuff
}
}
}
Other threads can now call queue.put()
to send messages to thread A
.