Interrupt a connecting socket

Can you instead use a non-blocking socket? I'm not much of a Java expert, but it looks like SocketChannel is their non-blocking socket class.

Here is an example:

// Create a non-blocking socket and check for connections
try {
    // Create a non-blocking socket channel on port 80
    SocketChannel sChannel = createSocketChannel("hostname.com", 80);

    // Before the socket is usable, the connection must be completed
    // by calling finishConnect(), which is non-blocking
    while (!sChannel.finishConnect()) {
        // Do something else
    }
    // Socket channel is now ready to use
} catch (IOException e) {
}

Taken from here: http://www.exampledepot.com/egs/java.nio/NbClientSocket.html

Inside the while loop you can check for some shared notification that you need to be cancelled and bail out, closing the SocketChannel as you go.

I tried the suggested answers but nothing worked for me. So what I did was, instead of setting my connection timeout to 10 seconds I try to connect 5 times in a row with a connection timeout of 2 seconds. I also have a global variable boolean cancelConnection declared.

Every time a timeout exception is thrown, I can eather break out of or continue the loop based on the value of cancelConnection.

Here's a code snippet from an android app I'm writing:

try {
    SocketAddress socketaddres = new InetSocketAddress(server.ip,server.port);
    int max=5;
    for (int i = 1; i<=max; i++) {
        try {
            socket = new Socket();
            socket.connect(socketaddres, 2000);
            break;
        } catch (Exception e) {
            Log.d(TAG, "attempt "+i+ " failed");
            if (cancelConnection) {
                Log.d(TAG, "cancelling connection");
                throw new Exception();
            } else if (i==max) {
                throw new Exception();
            }
        }
    }
} catch (Exception e) {
    if (cancelConnection) {
            // Do whatever you would do after connection was canceled.
    } else {
            // Do whatever you would do after connection error or timeout
    }
}

If you are using a blocking socket implementation, interrupting the thread won't 'cancel' or interrupt your socket connection. The only way of breaking out of the 'blocking call' is to 'close' the socket. You can expose a method on your Runnable tasks (e.g. cancel) which close the socket and clean up the resources when the user tries connecting to a second server.

If you want you can have a look at my throwaway attempt at interrupting threads which make blocking calls.