Java ReentrantReadWriteLocks - how to safely acquire write lock?

Question

I am using in my code at the moment a ReentrantReadWriteLock to synchronize access over a tree-like structure. This structure is large, and read by many threads at once wit

Answer 1

What about this something like this?

class CachedData
{
    Object data;
    volatile boolean cacheValid;

    private class MyRWLock
    {
        private final ReentrantReadWriteLock rwl = new ReentrantReadWriteLock();
        public synchronized void getReadLock()         { rwl.readLock().lock(); }
        public synchronized void upgradeToWriteLock()  { rwl.readLock().unlock();  rwl.writeLock().lock(); }
        public synchronized void downgradeToReadLock() { rwl.writeLock().unlock(); rwl.readLock().lock();  }
        public synchronized void dropReadLock()        { rwl.readLock().unlock(); }
    }
    private MyRWLock myRWLock = new MyRWLock();

    void processCachedData()
    {
        myRWLock.getReadLock();
        try
        {
            if (!cacheValid)
            {
                myRWLock.upgradeToWriteLock();
                try
                {
                    // Recheck state because another thread might have acquired write lock and changed state before we did.
                    if (!cacheValid)
                    {
                        data = ...
                        cacheValid = true;
                    }
                }
                finally
                {
                    myRWLock.downgradeToReadLock();
                }
            }
            use(data);
        }
        finally
        {
            myRWLock.dropReadLock();
        }
    }
}