Question

I have a class that takes objects from a BlockingQueue and processes them by calling take() in a continuous loop. At some point I know that no more objects will be added to the queue. How do I interrupt the take() method so that it stops blocking?

Here’s the class that processes the objects:

public class MyObjHandler implements Runnable {

  private final BlockingQueue<MyObj> queue;

  public class MyObjHandler(BlockingQueue queue) {
    this.queue = queue;
  }

  public void run() {
    try {
      while (true) {
        MyObj obj = queue.take();
        // process obj here
        // ...
      }
    } catch (InterruptedException e) {
      Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
    }
  }
}

And here’s the method that uses this class to process objects:

public void testHandler() {

  BlockingQueue<MyObj> queue = new ArrayBlockingQueue<MyObj>(100);  

  MyObjectHandler  handler = new MyObjectHandler(queue);
  new Thread(handler).start();

  // get objects for handler to process
  for (Iterator<MyObj> i = getMyObjIterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
    queue.put(i.next());
  }

  // what code should go here to tell the handler
  // to stop waiting for more objects?
}

Answer 1

If interrupting the thread is not an option, another is to place a “marker” or “command” object on the queue that would be recognized as such by MyObjHandler and break out of the loop.