26. Dealing with XML Payloads

26.1 Introduction

Spring Integration's XML support extends the Spring Integration Core with implementations of splitter, transformer, selector and router designed to make working with xml messages in Spring Integration simple. The provided messaging components are designed to work with xml represented in a range of formats including instances of java.lang.String, org.w3c.dom.Document and javax.xml.transform.Source. It should be noted however that where a DOM representation is required, for example in order to evaluate an XPath expression, the String payload will be converted into the required type and then converted back again to String. Components that require an instance of DocumentBuilder will create a namespace aware instance if one is not provided. Where greater control of the document being created is required an appropriately configured instance of DocumentBuilder should be provided.