Question

Ok, so I am little perplexed as to why synchronized was used in the line marked below.

To me, you only use synchronized where a block of code will potentially be accessed by multiple threads however this code is only ever called from this thread in its run method.

An instance of mConnectThread is declared as a field at the very start of the class.

public class BluetoothChatService {

// Member fields   
private ConnectThread mConnectThread;

Any ideas?

/**
 * This thread runs while attempting to make an outgoing connection
 * with a device. It runs straight through; the connection either
 * succeeds or fails.
 */
private class ConnectThread extends Thread {
    private final BluetoothSocket mmSocket;
    private final BluetoothDevice mmDevice;
    private String mSocketType;

    public ConnectThread(BluetoothDevice device, boolean secure) {
        mmDevice = device;
        BluetoothSocket tmp = null;
        mSocketType = secure ? "Secure" : "Insecure";

        // Get a BluetoothSocket for a connection with the
        // given BluetoothDevice
        try {
            if (secure) {
                tmp = device.createRfcommSocketToServiceRecord(
                        MY_UUID_SECURE);
            } else {
                tmp = device.createInsecureRfcommSocketToServiceRecord(
                        MY_UUID_INSECURE);
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            Log.e(TAG, "Socket Type: " + mSocketType + "create() failed", e);
        }
        mmSocket = tmp;
    }

    public void run() {
        Log.i(TAG, "BEGIN mConnectThread SocketType:" + mSocketType);
        setName("ConnectThread" + mSocketType);

        // Always cancel discovery because it will slow down a connection
        mAdapter.cancelDiscovery();

        // Make a connection to the BluetoothSocket
        try {
            // This is a blocking call and will only return on a
            // successful connection or an exception
            mmSocket.connect();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            // Close the socket
            try {
                mmSocket.close();
            } catch (IOException e2) {
                Log.e(TAG, "unable to close() " + mSocketType +
                        " socket during connection failure", e2);
            }
            connectionFailed();
            return;
        }

        /********* THIS BIT OF CODE BELOW IS WHAT I AM ASKING ABOUT **********/

        // Reset the ConnectThread because we're done
        synchronized (BluetoothChatService.this) {
            mConnectThread = null;
        }

        /**********************************^^*********************************/

        // Start the connected thread
        connected(mmSocket, mmDevice, mSocketType);
    }

    public void cancel() {
        try {
            mmSocket.close();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            Log.e(TAG, "close() of connect " + mSocketType + " socket failed", e);
        }
    }
}

Cheers

Answer 1

You can have multiple ConnectThread objects going simultaneously, which means multiple threads in the same run method(technically, copies of the run method, but the same code), though they’ll all have access to different member variables. The synchronized block is syncing on an external object, so I suspect there’s a synchronized block somewhere else in the program that looks like

synchronized (BluetoothChatService.this)
{
  if (mConnectThread != null)
    do some work that would throw NPE without the check.
}

Edit:

To clarify, they aren’t preventing two threads from accessing the same block of code, they’re preventing two threads from accessing the same variable from different sections of code.