SwingWorker Opinions

[frejon26]

I have written a console program in java that reads a rather large (un-formatted) text file and formats it. I wrote a class called FormatText which creates a new thread and formats the text while another Thread, ( the controller ) thread can report updates.

Anyway, long story short, I have updated the program to a GUI with swing and I use the SwingWorker class to create a background thread which uses the FormatText class to load the TextFile.

By creating a while loop inside of the SwingWorker's doInBackground()
method...

FormatText text = new FormatText(fileName);
Thread t = new Thread(text); //text is runnable...
t.start(); //and the run method has the logic...
while(t.isAlive())
{
   this.progress = text.getProgress(); //my class has getProgress method
   this.setProgress(progress);
   try{ Thread.sleep(100); } catch(InterruptedException ie){ } 
}

this has been the only way for me to successfully report to a JProgressBar on the progress of the file being formatted, the only drawback, is that I feel I am wasting many clock cycles while the program runs...

I tried passing a reference of the SwingWorker class to the FormatText class but the SwingWorker's setProgress() method is protected... so aside from copying and pasting the run() method of my FormatText class into the doInBackground() method of the SwingWorker is there any kind of work around that I can have another class set the progress of the invoking SwingWorker Object.

Any ideas or criticism is appreciated.

[Fubarable]

hm, a public wrapper method within the SwingWorker whose only job is to call setProgress may work, as long as thread issues are cared for.

[frejon26]

I thought about that, and I think I will do that, but then I would need to...

1. make my inner class that extends SwingWorker public. rather than a private inner class.

2. pass not an instance of type SwingWorker, but of the class that actually extends it, in this case, BackgroundTask, to the FormatText class.

3. include a new public method like update(int i); that will update the progress.

- thanks Fubarable.

[Fubarable]

I have to admit that having a SwingWorker and then having an outside class set progress sounds a bit different. Are you sure that this is the best design for your app? Should the outside class that's setting the property actually be called within a SwingWorker itself?