Question

I have a ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor with which I schedule a task to run at a fixed rate. I want the task to be running with a specified delay for a maximum of say 10 times until it “succeeds”. After that, I will not want the task to be retried. So basically I’ll need to stop running the scheduled task when I want it to be stopped, but without shutting down the ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor. Any idea how I’d do that?

Here’s some pseudocode –

public class ScheduledThreadPoolExecutorTest
{
  public static ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor executor = new ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor(15);  // no multiple instances, just one to serve all requests

  class MyTask implements Runnable
  {
    private int MAX_ATTEMPTS = 10;
    public void run()
    {
      if(++attempt <= MAX_ATTEMPTS)
      {
        doX();
        if(doXSucceeded)
        {
          //stop retrying the task anymore
        }
      }
      else
      { 
        //couldn't succeed in MAX attempts, don't bother retrying anymore!
      }
    }
  }

  public void main(String[] args)
  {
    executor.scheduleAtFixedRate(new ScheduledThreadPoolExecutorTest().new MyTask(), 0, 5, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
  }
}

Answer 1

run this test, it prints 1 2 3 4 5 and stops

public class ScheduledThreadPoolExecutorTest {
    static ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor executor = new ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor(15); // no
    static ScheduledFuture<?> t;

    static class MyTask implements Runnable {
        private int attempt = 1;

        public void run() {
            System.out.print(attempt + " ");
            if (++attempt > 5) {
                t.cancel(false);
            }
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        t = executor.scheduleAtFixedRate(new MyTask(), 0, 1, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
    }
}