I feel the approach in accepted answer is a bit outdated. With Java8, it can be done much simpler.
Say, you have a method
MyResult conjureResult(String param) throws MyException { ... }
then you can do this (keep reading, this is just to show the approach):
private final ExecutorService timeoutExecutorService = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor();
MyResult conjureResultWithTimeout(String param, int timeoutMs) throws Exception {
Future<MyResult> future = timeoutExecutorService.submit(() -> conjureResult(param));
return future.get(timeoutMs, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
}
of course, throwing Exception is bad, here is the correct extended version with proper error processing, but I suggest you examine it carefully, your may want to do some things differently (logging, returning timeout in extended result etc.):
private final ExecutorService timeoutExecutorService = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor();
MyResult conjureResultWithTimeout(String param, int timeoutMs) throws MyException {
Future<MyResult> future = timeoutExecutorService.submit(() -> conjureResult(param));
try {
return future.get(timeoutMs, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
//something interrupted, probably your service is shutting down
Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
throw new RuntimeException(e);
} catch (ExecutionException e) {
//error happened while executing conjureResult() - handle it
if (e.getCause() instanceof MyException) {
throw (MyException)e.getCause();
} else {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
} catch (TimeoutException e) {
//timeout expired, you may want to do something else here
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
}