Question

In most cases when you create your thread you can prepare the data beforehand and pass it into the constructor or method.

However in cases like an open socket connection you will typically already have a thread created but wish to tell it to perform some action.

Basic idea:

C#

private Thread _MyThread = new Thread(MyMethod);
this._MyThread.Start(param);   

Java

private Thread _MyThread = new Thread(new MyRunnableClass(param));
this._MyThread.start();

Now what?

So what is the correct way to pass data to a running thread in C# and Java?

Answer 1

One way to pass data to a running thread is by implementing Message Queues. The thread that wants to tell the listening thread to do something would add an item to the queue of the listening thread. The listening thread reads from this thread in a blocking fashion. Causing it to wait when there are no actions to perform. Whenever another thread puts a message in the queue it will fetch the message, depending on the item and it’s content you can then do something with it.

This is some Java / pseudo code:

class Listener
{
   private Queue queue;
   public SendMessage(Message m)
   {
     // This will be executed in the calling thread.
     // The locking will be done either in this function or in the Add below
     // depending on your Queue implementation.
     synchronize(this.queue) 
     {
        this.queue.put(m);
     }
   }

   public Loop()
   {
     // This function should be called from the Listener thread.
     while(true) 
     {
        Message m = this.queue.take();
        doAction(m);
     }
   }

   public doAction(Message m)
   {
      if (m is StopMessage)
      {
        ...
      }
   }
}

And the caller:

class Caller
{
  private Listener listener;

  LetItStop()
  {
     listener.SendMessage(new StopMessage());
  }
}

Of course, there are a lot of best practices when programming paralllel/concurrent code. For example, instead of while(true) you should at the least add a field like run :: Bool that you can set to false when you receive a StopMessage. Depending on the language in which you want to implement this you will have other primitives and behaviour to deal with.

In Java for example you might want to use the java.util.Concurrent package to keep things simple for you.