Question

As I understand this is very common snippet for multithreading in Java.

boolean loaded = false;
Object lock = new Object();

public void block() {
    synchronized (lock) {
        while(!loaded)
            lock.wait(); // Unhandled exception type InterruptedException
    }
}

and in another thread

public void done () {
    synchronized (lock) {
        loaded = true;
        lock.notify();
    }
}

But I am not sure where I should put try and catch, I can surround whole synchronized block or only lock.wait()? What is rule of thumb and does it really matter?

For handling is it okay to call Thread.currentThread().interrupt() in this situation?

Answer 1

You might want to consider the article by Brian Goetz: Java theory and practice: Dealing with InterruptedException

In general, if you don’t know what to do then don’t do anything but let a caller code know that this method can be interrupted while waiting on a lock. You can do this by adding throws InterruptedException to a method signature.

If for some reason you are forced to add a try/catch block and handle the exception then Thread.currentThread().interrupt() will do but re-throwing it can be as suitable.