SwingWorker not responding

Question

What I am trying to do ?

At the click of the Start JButton, the SwingWorker will execute. Inside the doInBackground(

Answer 1

if I add Thread.sleep(...), it does work, though, it throws a InterruptedException

The code that apparently produces the exception (copied from OP's edit):

while (!isCancelled()) {
    counter %= arrNames.length;
    // System.out.format("Counter : %d%n", counter);
    publish(arrNames[counter]);
    try {
        Thread.sleep(30); // throws
    } catch (InterruptedException ie) {
        ie.printStackTrace();
    }
    counter++;
}

The reason, though, is the code that cancels the worker (in the actionListener):

backgroundTask.cancel(true);

which explicitly tells the worker to cancel by .. interrupting the thread. From its api doc:

mayInterruptIfRunning - true if the thread executing this task should be interrupted; otherwise, in-progress tasks are allowed to complete

As an aside: catching the exception and doing nothing (thereby effectively ignoring the interrupt) is not the best of ideas. Probably not too damaging in this case - due to checking the cancelled status. Typical worker implementations either catch and return, after doing some internal cleanup if needed, or don't handle it at all.