Question

Normally, when I close my app I send an intent to my service to signal to safely shutdown using onStartCommand with an extra boolean of true. I do this in my application class’ onTerminate. I added the if statements because I was getting a nullptrexception when force closing the app in this block.

@Override
public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) {
    if (intent != null) {
        boolean state = intent.getBooleanExtra("terminate", false);
        mSafeShutdown = state;
    }
    else if (mUpdater != null && mUpdater.isRunning()) {
        Log.d(TAG, "activity force closed?" + 
            " Attempting to handle service thread shutdown safely...");
        mUpdater.isRunning(false);
        try {
            mUpdater.join();
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            Log.e(TAG,"Service's UpdaterThread couldn't join");
        }
    }
    return START_STICKY;
}

however, this causes my service to stay alive –

static final int DELAY = 2000;
public void run() {
    while (mIsRunning) {
        if (!mJobQueue.isEmpty()) {
            //do work
        }
        else if (mSafeShutdown) {
            mIsRunning = false;
            stopSelf();
        }
        else {
            sleep(DELAY);
        }
    }
}

The fact that force closing disconnects the debugger its making hard to see exactly whats going on.. Is there a better/safer way to tell my service thread that the application has shut down?

Answer 1

since your thread is a child class, create a method in it to shut it down the thread and call it in your parent class.

An example can be found here
http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/guide/misc/threadPrimitiveDeprecation.html