Updating a Thread variable.

[GoodVic Hunting]

Ladies n Gents,

A bit of help please.

I have a gui which contains a bunch of buttons. Each button corresponds to a process that I am monitoring. When a button is clicked, I need to display any messages pertaining to that process that I have. When an another button in clicked, I abandon the previous process and display updates for the another process.

My initial design was to have one thread which will display message for all the processes. Whenever a different button is clicked, I will update a variable in the thread to indicate it to get the update for a different process. This however, is not working, the thread starts and runs fine for the first click but doesn't seem to get notified when the second button is clicked.

class UpdateDataThread extends Thread{
 
volatile int index ;
 
public UpdateDataThread( int index){
this.index = index;
}
 
public void run(){
 
while( true ){
 
//Get the message pertaining to the process
String pName = processNames.get(index).toString().toLowerCase();
String msg = null;
 
if(statusMsgTable.containsKey(pName)){
msg = statusMsgTable.get(pName).toString();
}else{
msg = new Date(System.currentTimeMillis()) + " NO_MESSAGE_REPORTED;
}
 
 //Display the message
liveWindow.insertText(pName, msg );
 
try{
Thread.sleep( 1000 );
}catch(Exception e){
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
 
//When another button is clicked, update the index
//This update however is not being picked by the running thread.
public void setIndex(int index ){
this.index = index;
}
 
}

Any Ideas, links would be appreciated.

Cheers

[Harish Kashyap]

Interrupting the thread may be helpful in this scenario