LogixNG Tutorial - Chapter 13

Threads

The ConditionalNGs run in a separate thread from the rest of JMRI. But it's possible to use several threads for LogixNG, to let some ConditionalNGs run on one thread and other ConditionalNGs run on another thread. You might have one ConditionalNG that is slow and other ConditionalNGs that needs to respond quickly. It could then be useful to move the slow ConditionalNG to a different thread.

Note that if a ConditionalNG is too slow, it will be difficult to edit that ConditionalNG since the editor needs to wait on the ConditionalNG to finish execution before the editor can update it.

If you want to move a ConditionalNG from one thread to another, you need to restart JMRI for the change to take effect.

The main reason to use different threads for different ConditionalNGs is the debugger (se chapter 14). When you debug a ConditionalNG step by step, the debugger stops the thread that the ConditionalNG is running on. If there are other ConditionalNGs running on the same thread, those are stopped as well. Therefore it's often useful to move the ConditionalNG that you want to debug to its own thread before you start debugging it. To simplify this, there is an extra thread, called the debug thread, that you can use for this purpose. But every thread might be used for debugging.

Run code on a ConditionalNG thread

If you want to run some code on a particular ConditionalNG thread, you can use this code:

_conditionalNG.getCurrentThread().runOnLogixNG(() -> {
    // Do something
});

int delay = 1000;   // 1 second
_conditionalNG.getCurrentThread().runOnLogixNGDelayed(() -> {
    // Do something
}, delay);

_conditionalNG.getCurrentThread().runOnLogixNGEventually(() -> {
    // Do something
});