CODEWITHSUNDEEP
eclipsemultithreadingeclipse-plugineclipse-rcp
Jdv
Jdv

Reputation: 993

Eclipse Background Job: Process specific calls in the Main thread?

I've been working on an Eclipse-Plugin for a while (my first one, everything is very new).

Now I've realized that I have to add threading by using background jobs, because I don't want the GUI to be frozen during the long processes in my Plugin. But because I didn't think (or know) about this when I started coding, I have multiple GUI-accesses sprinkled all over the long-running processes, therefore I can't simply put them into a job.

Is there any way I can, from inside a job, make those GUI-acccesses to be processed in the Main thread? Otherwise I will have to change the structure of my whole Plugin which is kinda a lot of work.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 481

Answers (1)

greg-449
greg-449

Reputation: 111162

You can use the Display asyncExec or syncExec methods to run a Runnable in the UI thread from your job.

Display.getDefault().asyncExec(runnable);

asyncExec just schedules the runnable to run as soon as possible. syncExec blocks until the runnable has executed.

If you are using Java 8 you can use a lambda for the runnable:

Display.getDefault().asyncExec(() -> { code });

If you want to do something like prompt for a value use a Runnable class that saves the result and use syncExec to run it:

class PromptRunnable implements Runnable
{
  private String result;

  public void run()
  { 
    result = .... some prompt dialog
  }

  String getResult()
  {
    return result;
  }
}

PromptRunnable doPrompt = new PromptRunnable();

Display.getDefault().syncExec(doPrompt);

String result = doPrompt.getResult();

Upvotes: 1

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