Progress monitoring for long operation

Question

I know that questions similar to this have been asked many times, but I have not gotten an answer that works for me, so here goes. I have a dialog box with various parameters that the user can specify for a long running task. After the user clicks "OK", I want the dialog box to disappear and instead to have an indeterminate jprogressbar display while the task is running. I have tried using SwingWorker classes and invokeLater(), but I ahve not gotten anything to work. Could someebody please help me out with which parts of the code:
1. Destroying the old dialog box
2. Starting the long task
3. creating the JProgressbar and making it indeterminate
4. Destroying the JProgressBar
5. informing the user that the task is complete
need to be performed using a SwingWorker or invokelater and how the parts should fit together.
Thank you for the help,
Jeff

Answer 1

1. Destroying the old dialog box"old dialog box".dispose();
3. creating the JProgressbar and making it
indeterminateBetter create JProgressBar object before starting the thread.
2. Starting the long task
4. Destroying the JProgressBar
5. informing the user that the task is completeIn your class, define the SwingWorker as:
    final SwingWorker worker = new SwingWorker() {
        public Object construct() {
            /* start your long task.
             * Call local method, method from other
             * class, whatever.
            return new Object();
        public void finished() {
            /* To finish off the long task.
             * This method is called when the thread
             * finishes.
             * This where you destroy your progress bar
             * and inform user the task is completed.
    };Of course, you'll need another thread to monitor the progress of your task, and increment the value in progress bar.
As for indeterminate progress bar, you'll need to know some estimate anyway.
If at all possible to break the long task in blocks/sections, that number can be applied to the progress bar. Otherwise, get an average performance time, and set the maximum with a figure, and slowly increment the progress bar. If it reaches 99% before finish, then I guess you have to wait till the task ends, then display 100%. If finishes quickly, then you can boost the speed of increment (or instantly display 100%).
Alternatively, if you can determine (dynamically) how long before the end of task while running your task, you can always update your JProgressBar values (you probably aware of this, anyway).
Hope this helps.