Question

The first time I made a method to read data from my chat server, it frooz. I found out I had the wrong port number and it was freezing at
new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));

Is there a way to have a time out so my program does not freez on a network error? I’m assuming there must be,
the complete methed

void SendMessage()
        {
            try {


            URL url = new URL("http://50.63.66.138:1044/update");
               System.out.println("make connection");
               URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
               conn.setDoOutput(true);
               BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));


            //   String line;
               String f=new String("");
               String line=new String();
               while ((line= rd.readLine()  ) != null) {
                 f=f+line;
                 f+="\n";
               }
               mUsers.setText(f);

        } catch (Exception e) {

               System.out.println("exception");
               System.out.println(e.getMessage());
           }

        }
}

Answer 1

First of all, I hope you execute this code in a separate thread in order to make your UI thread responsive on touches even while connection is being established.
Second, there are two timeout methods available for URLConnection class:
http://developer.android.com/reference/java/net/URLConnection.html#setReadTimeout(int)
http://developer.android.com/reference/java/net/URLConnection.html#setConnectTimeout(int)

Try to play with these guys, maybe it will help.
If not, you can always do your own way:
start the thread with a runnable which tries to establish a connection and InputReader. Then wait for some time-out and try to interrupt the thread if it is still running.