How to kill/stop a Thread

[rajshkhr pandey]

Hello to all,

In my application, using RMI and sockets, when an user logs in it creates an thread corresponding to the username. Now when user logs out I need to kill/stop the thread corresponding to that user.

How can I identify the thread corresponding to the user and how can I stop that thread?

Thanks in Advance.

[Rok Štelcer]

Hi,

rajshkhr pandey wrote: How can I identify the thread corresponding to the user ...

Well, you could define e.g. a HashMap (username, created thread).
I guess this would be the easiest way ...

rajshkhr pandey wrote:... and how can I stop that thread?

You will have to declare some variable (usually a boolean), which is then checked in a loop (within a run method).
Beside this, you may also want to call an interrupt() ... just in case the thread is currently waiting or is blocked.

Hope this helps.


Regards,
Rok

[William Brogden]

Just to amplify what Rok said - you have to design your run method so that it can be exited gracefully. There are many pitfalls if you try to just arbitrarily stop a Thread. Read the java.lang.Thread documentation carefully, especially the deprecated stop() method documentation.

If the user is formally logging out rather then just disconnecting, you already have the Thread corresponding to the user so clean up of resources and a graceful exit from run should be easy with a proper architecture.

Bill