ExecutorService, how to know when all threads finished without blocking the main thread?

Question

I have a multithreaded implementation where i create an ExecutorService and submit tasks to be executed, i want to know when all the threads is submited have finished without blocking the main thread and the UI. I've tried ExecutorService.awaitTermination() but it blocks the main thread and the UI. I've searched alot but i can't seem to find an elegant way of doing this. I'm currently thinking about creating another thread that counts the amount of threads finished and launches an event when they all finished, but that doesn't to be a good approach and i wanted a better solution!

Answer 1

Use a SwingWorker to shutdown the thread pool and call awaitTermination(). This will prevent the UI from blocking and call done() from the Event Dispatch Thread on your SwingWorker implementation which you can use to trigger the whatever UI changes you need.

If you desire to keep track of the threads running via a UI update you can use the the worker thread to monitor this in a loop and call publish() with arguments which then get passed to your implementation of process() on the EDT.