Question

I am trying to validate some text files. In the front end i am using JTextarea, The below method is called on every time the user enter ‘Enter’ key. If the file is too big,say 5000 lines and if the user enters many times ‘Enter’ key then, i am getting unexpected results, like even if the line is valid, it shows it as invalid.

Is there any thing to do with sleep, should i have to increase the sleep time or something else has to be done? Any ideas will be helpful

private TreeSet validate(int curLine, TreeSet errorSet) {
    int increment = 0;
    int nextLine = 0;

    if (curLine == lines.length || errorSet.size() != 0) {
        return errorSet;
    } else {
        String line = lines[curLine];

        //validation starts.  After validation, line is incremented as per the requirements

         increment = 1 //As per requirement. Depends on validation results of the line



        if (increment > 0) {
            try{
                 Thread.currentThread().sleep(100);  
               }catch(Exception ex){
                 System.out.println(ex); 
               }
            nextLine = (curLine + increment);
            validate(nextLine, errorSet);
        }
    }
    return errorSet;
}  

Answer 1

I wouldnt look at making the sleep time any longer/shorter. Instead, I would consider doing a better time at marshalling the trigger to validate. Is there any reason to allow the input of a validation request while one is in progress? if not, i would look at blocking the call to validate while a current process is still not complete.

If you think that multiple validations should be able to occur in tandem, I would then look to the creation of a thread pool for these actions. Testing my determine how many threads can concurrently run, and therefore determine the size of your threadpool. At this point, system memory may also play an important point, so you may want to look at those statistics while testing as well.