Displaying a JDialog from a thread other than the EDT

[kjkrum]

It's late and I can't get my head around this problem.

My application uses a worker thread that may need to display a dialog. Simple enough to queue a Runnable to be invoked by the EDT. But how can I get the user's input back from the dialog in a thread-safe way?

The simplest solution I can think of would be to use a bean with synchronized getters and setters. First the worker thread would create the bean, populate its fields, and use it to construct the dialog in the EDT. Then the dialog would update the bean when it is closed. Finally, the worker thread would retrieve the new values from the bean. The worker thread would wait() on the bean, and the dialog would notify() it.

Does anyone know a better pattern? Meanwhile, I'm going to sleep on it.

[DarrylBurke]

SwingPropertyChangeSupport with a PropertyChangeListener?

db

[doWhile]

Another alternative - construct a bean which contains fields for the values you need, create a final instance of this bean, then call SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait to display the dialog and populate the bean values. The thread will wait until the Swing Runnable is complete (or an Exception is thrown), after which your bean is populated with the values.