Canceling Background Tasks

To cancel a running background task, invoke SwingWorker.cancel The task must cooperate with its own cancellation. There are two ways it can do this:

• By terminating when it receives an interrupt. This procedures is described in Interrupts in Concurrency.
• By invoking SwingWorker.isCancelled at short intervals. This method returns true if cancel has been invoked for this SwingWorker.

The cancel method takes a single boolean argument. If the argument is true, cancel sends the background task an interrupt. Whether the argument is true or false, invoking cancel changes the cancellation status of the object to true. This is the value returned by isCancelled. Once changed, the cancellation status cannot be changed back.

The Flipper example from the previous section uses the status-only idiom. The main loop in doInBackground exits when isCancelled returns true. This will occur when the user clicks the "Cancel" button, triggering code that invokes cancel with an argument of false.

The status-only approach makes sense for Flipper because its implementation of SwingWorker.doInBackground does not include any code that might throw InterruptedException. To respond to an interrupt, the background task would have to invoke Thread.isInterrupted at short intervals. It's just as easy to use SwingWorker.isCancelled for the same purpose