Blocking Dialog from within JNI code

Question

I'm writing an app that's basically a wrapper around a 250K JNI. The JNI (a game engine) has APIs like handle_penUp(int x, int y). Sometimes it needs to query the user from inside handle_penUp() (via callbacks into Java code), so the dialog I use to implement the query must block.

I understand that the main thread of execution can't block. So I've spawned a second thread that makes all the JNI calls that might result in callbacks that would need to block. Inside that second thread, when I need to put up a blocking dialog, I call startActivityForResult() and then acquire() on a semaphore. When onActivityResult() gets called on the main thread it calls release() on the same semaphore.

This works if my query is implemented as a new Activity, but not if I want to showDialog() within the existing Activity. Log messages tell me my thread needs a Looper. I'm adding one -- and will append info on whether it works -- but it feels as if I'm going down the wrong path here. What I need is a recipe for doing blocking dialogs (useful if only because every other platform has them and so ported code will often work that way.)

Answer 1

You definitely don't want two UI threads. There should be only one thread that communicates with the Android SDK as far as the control flow and display go (i.e. anything related to drawing, starting activities, displaying dialogs, etc).

Also, keep in mind that you don't want to actually keep your thread running - everything is based on events, so you want your code to respond to something, do something, and then exit as soon as possible.

When you say "block", what exactly do you mean? What needs to be blocked? If you simply need to stop responding to events, why not have a boolean that is set to true while the dialog is visible, and simply ignore all events while it is true?

Answer 2

Hi

It sound very close to a problem I had with setting visible/invisible some view from the touch thread.

the problem is that you can't do some operations on the GUI form another thread (which is your case)

what you need to do is to use a Handle in your main thread I declared it in the Activity

public static final Handler handlerVisibility = new Handler() {
    public void handleMessage(Message msg) {
        int visibility = msg.getData().getInt("visibility");
        view.setVisibility(visibility);
    }
};

I chose the option of public static so that I can access in anywhere (because I never have more that one call at a time and that I felt lazy to pass it along to the sub classes).

then what you want to do is send a message to this handler and since the Handler is in the same thread as the gui it works ^^

Message msg = MainActivity.handlerVisibility.obtainMessage();
    Bundle b = new Bundle();
            b.putInt("visibility", View.VISIBLE);
    msg.setData(b);
            MainActivity.handlerVisibility.sendMessage(msg);

That should solve your looper error and allow you to send GUI request from one thread to another

hope it helps

Jason