Question

I wrote a programm that reads a csv file and puts it into a TableModel. My problem is that I want to expand the programm so, that if the csv file gets changes from outside my tablemodel gets updated and gets the new values.

I would now programm a scheduler so that the thread sleeps for about a minute and checks it every minute if the timestamp of the file changed. If so it would read the file again. But i dont know what happens to the whole programm if i use a scheduler because this little software i write will be a part of a much much bigger software wich is running on JDK 6. So I search for a performant and independent from the bigger software solution to get the changes in the tablemodel.

Can someone help out?

Answer 1

java.nio.file package now contains the Watch Service API. This, effectively:

This API enables you to register a directory (or directories) with the
watch service. When registering, you tell the service which types of
events you are interested in: file creation, file deletion, or file
modification. When the service detects an event of interest, it is
forwarded to the registered process. The registered process has a
thread (or a pool of threads) dedicated to watching for any events it
has registered for. When an event comes in, it is handled as needed.

See reference here.

Oh! This API is only available from JDK 7 (onwards).