If only 1 timer may ever be active at the same time, there are a couple of solutions.
First of all the @Timer should probably be present on an @Singleton. In a Singleton methods are by default write-locked, so the container will automatically be locked-out when trying to invoke the timer method while there’s still activity in it.
The following is basically enough:
@Singleton
public class TimerBean {
@Schedule(second= "*/5", minute = "*", hour = "*", persistent = false)
public void atSchedule() throws InterruptedException {
System.out.println("Called");
Thread.sleep(10000);
}
}
atSchedule is write-locked by default and there can only ever be one thread active in it, including calls initiated by the container.
Upon being locked-out, the container may retry the timer though, so to prevent this you’d use a read lock instead and delegate to a second bean (the second bean is needed because EJB 3.1 does not allow upgrading a read lock to a write lock).
The timer bean:
@Singleton
public class TimerBean {
@EJB
private WorkerBean workerBean;
@Lock(READ)
@Schedule(second = "*/5", minute = "*", hour = "*", persistent = false)
public void atSchedule() {
try {
workerBean.doTimerWork();
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Timer still busy");
}
}
}
The worker bean:
@Singleton
public class WorkerBean {
@AccessTimeout(0)
public void doTimerWork() throws InterruptedException {
System.out.println("Timer work started");
Thread.sleep(12000);
System.out.println("Timer work done");
}
}
This will likely still print a noisy exception in the log, so a more verbose but more silently solution is to use an explicit boolean:
The timer bean:
@Singleton
public class TimerBean {
@EJB
private WorkerBean workerBean;
@Lock(READ)
@Schedule(second = "*/5", minute = "*", hour = "*", persistent = false)
public void atSchedule() {
workerBean.doTimerWork();
}
}
The worker bean:
@Singleton
public class WorkerBean {
private AtomicBoolean busy = new AtomicBoolean(false);
@Lock(READ)
public void doTimerWork() throws InterruptedException {
if (!busy.compareAndSet(false, true)) {
return;
}
try {
System.out.println("Timer work started");
Thread.sleep(12000);
System.out.println("Timer work done");
} finally {
busy.set(false);
}
}
}
There are some more variations possible, e.g. you could delegate the busy check to an interceptor, or inject a singleton that only contains the boolean into the timer bean, and check that boolean there, etc.