sleep until a date occurs

[Murad Iqbal]

Hi all!
How can I make my thread sleep until a specified date (including hours, minutes and millis) occurs? Or do I have to calculate the current milliseconds and subtract it from the milliseconds of that date and then pass it on to thread.sleep method?
A quick reply and help is higly commended

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

There's no "sleep until date" function, so your two alternatives would be to compute a sleep interval (easy to do using the Date class) or poll like

while (not date yet)
  sleep(60000);

[Stan James]

Also take a look at java.util.Timer schedule(TimerTask task, Date time). Let us know if that does what you need.

[Abdul Basit]

murad i think u have a fit solution in your mind , calculate the second and pass it to sleep method , let us know your experience

[Murad Iqbal]

Well, the problem is solved.
What I have done is that I have created two calendars. First calendar has the current time on my machine and will return the current time in millis when i call the getTimeInMillis over it. The second calendar's DAY_OF_WEEK, HOUR_OF_DAY, MINUTE, SECOND, MILLISECOND are set to the desired date when I want the thread to sleep. I then invoked getTimeInMillis on the second calendar to get that time in milliseconds. Thereafter, I subtracted the milliseconds I got from the first calendar from the second calendar's millis. So now I have the milliseconds I want my thread to sleep. I then invoke Thread.sleep(milliseconds) to serve my purpose.
Regards,
Muhammad Murad Iqbal

[R Jelda]

Hi,
You don't need the first Calender.
U could just use System.currentTimeMillis().
Regards,
Jelda

[Stan James]

Cool, Murad. I think that's exactly what Timer does inside. Timer might pay off if you had a LOT of things to trigger at various times because it will manage any number of timer events on a single thread. It probably just sorts them in target time order and sleeps until the next one is due.

[JunKao Lin]

Hi Murad,

Originally posted by Murad Iqbal:
Hi all!
How can I make my thread sleep until a specified date (including hours, minutes and millis) occurs? Or do I have to calculate the current milliseconds and subtract it from the milliseconds of that date and then pass it on to thread.sleep method?
A quick reply and help is higly commended

I think you'd better use the data.wait() and data.notify().When the specified date occurs,you could invoke the data.notify() to make the method which has invoked the data.wait() become runnable again.