Question

So, I’m feeding file data to an API that takes a Reader, and I’d like a way to report progress.

It seems like it should be straightforward to write a FilterInputStream implementation that wraps the FileInputStream, keeps track of the number of bytes read vs. the total file size, and fires some event (or, calls some update() method) to report fractional progress.

(Alternatively, it could report absolute bytes read, and somebody else could do the math — maybe more generally useful in the case of other streaming situations.)

I know I’ve seen this before and I may even have done it before, but I can’t find the code and I’m lazy. Has anyone got it laying around? Or can someone suggest a better approach?

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One year (and a bit) later…

I implemented a solution based on Adamski’s answer below, and it worked, but after some months of usage I wouldn’t recommend it. When you have a lot of updates, firing/handling unnecessary progress events becomes a huge cost. The basic counting mechanism is fine, but much better to have whoever cares about the progress poll for it, rather than pushing it to them.

(If you know the total size, you can try only firing an event every > 1% change or whatever, but it’s not really worth the trouble. And often, you don’t.)

Answer 1

Here’s a fairly basic implementation that fires PropertyChangeEvents when additional bytes are read. Some caveats:

• The class does not support mark or reset operations, although these would be easy to add.
• The class does not check whether the total number bytes read ever exceeds the maximum number of bytes anticipated, although this could always be dealt with by client code when displaying progress.
• I haven’t test the code.

Code:

public class ProgressInputStream extends FilterInputStream {
    private final PropertyChangeSupport propertyChangeSupport;
    private final long maxNumBytes;
    private volatile long totalNumBytesRead;

    public ProgressInputStream(InputStream in, long maxNumBytes) {
        super(in);
        this.propertyChangeSupport = new PropertyChangeSupport(this);
        this.maxNumBytes = maxNumBytes;
    }

    public long getMaxNumBytes() {
        return maxNumBytes;
    }

    public long getTotalNumBytesRead() {
        return totalNumBytesRead;
    }

    public void addPropertyChangeListener(PropertyChangeListener l) {
        propertyChangeSupport.addPropertyChangeListener(l);
    }

    public void removePropertyChangeListener(PropertyChangeListener l) {
        propertyChangeSupport.removePropertyChangeListener(l);
    }

    @Override
    public int read() throws IOException {
        int b = super.read();
        updateProgress(1);
        return b;
    }

    @Override
    public int read(byte[] b) throws IOException {
        return (int)updateProgress(super.read(b));
    }

    @Override
    public int read(byte[] b, int off, int len) throws IOException {
        return (int)updateProgress(super.read(b, off, len));
    }

    @Override
    public long skip(long n) throws IOException {
        return updateProgress(super.skip(n));
    }

    @Override
    public void mark(int readlimit) {
        throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
    }

    @Override
    public void reset() throws IOException {
        throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
    }

    @Override
    public boolean markSupported() {
        return false;
    }

    private long updateProgress(long numBytesRead) {
        if (numBytesRead > 0) {
            long oldTotalNumBytesRead = this.totalNumBytesRead;
            this.totalNumBytesRead += numBytesRead;
            propertyChangeSupport.firePropertyChange("totalNumBytesRead", oldTotalNumBytesRead, this.totalNumBytesRead);
        }

        return numBytesRead;
    }
}