Question

First of all, I could not even chose the method to use, i’m reading for hours now and someone says use ‘Handlers’, someone says use ‘Timer’. Here’s what I try to achieve:

At preferences, theres a setting(checkbox) which to enable / disable the repeating job. As that checkbox is checked, the timer should start to work and the thread should be executed every x seconds. As checkbox is unchecked, timer should stop.

Here’s my code:

Checking whether if checkbox is checked or not, if checked ‘refreshAllServers’ void will be executed which does the job with timer.

boolean CheckboxPreference = prefs.getBoolean("checkboxPref", true);
                if(CheckboxPreference == true) {
                    Main main = new Main();
                    main.refreshAllServers("start");
                } else {
                    Main main = new Main();
                    main.refreshAllServers("stop");
                }

The refreshAllServers void that does the timer job:

public void refreshAllServers(String start) {

    if(start == "start") {

        // Start the timer which will repeatingly execute the thread

    } else {

        // stop the timer

            }

And here’s how I execute my thread: (Works well without timer)

Thread myThread = new MyThread(-5);
                myThread.start();

What I tried?

I tried any example I could see from Google (handlers, timer) none of them worked, I managed to start the timer once but stoping it did not work.
The simpliest & understandable code I saw in my research was this:

new java.util.Timer().schedule( 
        new java.util.TimerTask() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                // your code here
            }
        }, 
        5000 
);

Answer 1

Just simply use below snippet

private final Handler handler = new Handler();
private Runnable runnable = new Runnable() {
    public void run() {
         //
         // Do the stuff
         //

         handler.postDelayed(this, 1000);
    }
};
runnable.run();

To stop it use

handler.removeCallbacks(runnable);

Should do the trick.