Stopping a specific java thread

Question

I have a button "addCashier" which is creating a thread called "Cashier" now this thread is just simply generating orders every 4 seconds, a while(true) loop in the run() method of the thread. All is good there, but now I want to add a button to simulate cashiers logging off. I added a boolean variable to my while loop onDuty and a public function logOff() which sets this onDuty bool to false to get me out of the run's while loop. My problem now is from my gui class how can I call a function on a specific thread? Each cashier thread has been generated at runtime so I don't know their names.

I hope I made sense. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Thread t = CashierThread();  //keep the reference to thread somewhere...

Now instead of a boolean property use built-in interrupted flag:

public void run() {
  while(!Thread.currentThread().isInterrupted()) {
    //...
  }
}

When you want to turn of the thread by clicking on a button simply call:

t.interrupt();

Of course you need to have access to t variable from the client code.

Answer 2

You can store each thread's reference into a HashMap - along with its id or Name as the key. Later when you want to deal with one particular Cashier thread , use the Name or id to fetch the corresponding Thread from the HashMap and call the appropriate logOff() method on it.