How to timeout a URL connection?

Does anyone know how to set timeout for a URL connection?

I wrote a small program to fetch content and date of a URL from remote site. However, it hangs on some URLs (I tried these URLs on netscape, they also hangs). I would like to know whether I can set a timeout period for each connection. If you have a better way than writing specific threads to do this, please let me know.

Thanks in advance.
--Changzhou

P.S. The following is my code. I can always got "[JDT-DEBUG] connection opened", but sometimes "[JDT-DEBUG] got date" does not come out, and the program runs forever.



try {
URL url = new URL((String)sites.elementAt(siteIndex)+page.urlPath);
connection = url.openConnection();
// DEBUG-SECTION-BEGIN, BY Java Developement Template
System.out.println("[JDT-DEBUG]"+"["+id+"] connection opened");
// DEBUG-SECTION-END, BY Java Developement Template
} catch (Exception x) {
log("[ERROR] Openning "+page.urlPath+":"+x);
return DOWNLOADING_ERROR;
}
try {
// test if it is necessary to download from remote site
long date = connection.getDate() ;
// DEBUG-SECTION-BEGIN, BY Java Developement Template
System.out.println("[JDT-DEBUG]"+"["+id+"] got date");

Your best bet is to use create a java.net.Socket connection. In version 1.1 and greater you can set the timeout value for a socket. If the socket times out then it will throw an Exception. Catch the exception and continue from there.

Van Glass
[email protected]

If URL class is used, u can access sites from clients running behind proxy also. And u don't have to do extra coding for it.
But Socket can't access sites from clients running behind proxy directly. For accessing those sites, u have to implement the protocol for communicating with the proxy server.

Whether to go for Socket / URL depends on whether u want ppl behind proxy to access remote sites on internet or not. If using socket u want that, u will have to implement proxy client in ur application.

- UnicMan
http://members.tripod.com/unicman