How to interrupt a function call in Java

Question

I am trying to use a Third Party Internal Library which is processing a given request. Unfortunately it is synchronous in nature. Also I have no control on the code for the same. Basically it is a function call. This function seems to a bit erratic in behavior. Sometimes this function takes 10 ms to complete processing and sometimes it takes up to 300 secs to process the request.

Can you suggest me a way to write a wrapper around this function so that it would throw an interrupted exception if the function does not complete processing with x ms/secs. I can live with not having the results and continue processing, but cannot tolerate a 3 min delay.

PS: This function internally sends an update to another system using JMS and waits for that system to respond and sends apart from some other calculations.

Answer 1

Can you suggest me a way to write a wrapper around this function so that it would throw an interrupted exception if the function does not complete processing with x ms/secs.

This is not possible. InterruptException only gets thrown by specific methods. You can certainly call thread.stop() but this is deprecated and not recommended for a number of reasons.

A better alternative would be for your code to wait for the response for a certain amount of time and just abandon the call if doesn't work. For example, you could submit a Callable to a thread pool that actually makes the call to the "Third Party Internal Library". Then your main code would do a future.get(...) with a specific timeout.

// allows 5 JMS calls concurrently, change as necessary or used newCachedThreadPool()
ExecutorService threadPool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(5);
...
// submit the call to be made in the background by thread-pool
Future<Response> future = threadPool.submit(new Callable<Response>() {
   public Response call() {
      // this damn call can take 3 to 3000ms to complete dammit
      return thirdPartyInternalLibrary.makeJmsRequest();
   }
});
// wait for some max amount of time
Response response = null;
try {
    response = future.get(TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS, 100);
} catch (TimeoutException te) {
    // log that it timed out and continue or throw an exception
}

The problem with this method is that you might spawn a whole bunch of threads waiting for the library to respond to the remote JMS query that you would not have a lot of control over.

No easy solution.